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AN    ESSAY 
ON     COMEDY 


AN    ESSAY    ON 

COMEDY 

AND   THE    USES   OF   THE 
COMIC   SPIRIT 


BY 

GEORGE    MEREDITH 


WESTMINSTER 

ARCHIBALD  CONSTABLE  AND 

COMPANY.     1897 


This  Essay  was  first  published  in 

'The  New  Quarterly  Magazine' 

for  April  1877 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/essayoncomedyuseOOmererich 


ON  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

AND  OF  THE  USES  OF  THE 

COMIC    SPIRIT' 


Good  Comedies  are  such  rare  productions, 
that  notwithstanding  the  wealth  of  our 
literature  in  the  Comic  element,  it  would  not 
occupy  us  long  to  run  over  the  English  list. 
If  they  are  brought  to  the  test  I  shall  pro- 
pose, very  reputable  Comedies  will  be  found 
unworthy  of  their  station,  like  the  ladies  of 
Arthur's  Court  when  they  were  reduced  to 
the  ordeal  of  the  mantle. 

There  are  plain  reasons  why  the  Comic 
poet  is  not  a  frequent  apparition  ;  and  why 
the    great    Comic    poet    remains    without    a 

1  A  lecture  delivered  at  the  London  Institution, 
February  1st,  1877. 


8  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

fellow.  A  society  of  cultivated  men  and 
women  is  required,  wherein  ideas  are  current 
and  the  perceptions  quick,  that  he  may  be 
supplied  with  matter  and  an  audience.  The 
semi-barbarism  of  merely  giddy  communities, 
and  feverish  emotional  periods,  repel  him ; 
and  also  a  state  of  marked  social  inequality 
of  the  sexes ;  nor  can  he  whose  business  is  to 
address  the  mind  be  understood  where  there 
is  not  a  moderate  degree  of  intellectual 
activity. 

Moreover,  to  touch  and  kindle  the  mind 
through  laughter,  demands  more  than  spright- 
liness,  a  most  subtle  delicacy.  That  must  be 
a  natal  gift  in  the  Comic  poet.  The  substance 
he  deals  with  will  show  him  a  startling  exhi- 
bition of  the  dyer's  hand,  if  he  is  without  it. 
People  are  ready  to  surrender  themselves  to 
witty  thumps  on  the  back,  breast,  and  sides ; 
all  except  the  head:  and  it  is  there  that  he 
aims.  He  must  be  subtle  to  penetrate.  A 
corresponding  acuteness  must  exist  to  welcome 
him.     The  necessity  for   the   two   conditions 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  9 

will  explain  how  it  is  that  we  count  him 
during  centuries  in  the  singular  number. 

'C'est  une  etrange  entreprise  que  celle  de 
faire  rire  les  honnetes  gens,"*  Moliere  says ; 
and  the  difficulty  of  the  undertaking  cannot 
be  over-estimated. 

Then  again,  he  is  beset  with  foes  to  right 
and  left,  of  a  character  unknown  to  the  tragic 
and  the  lyric  poet,  or  even  to  philosophers. 

We  have  in  this  world  men  whom  Rabelais 
would  call  agelasts;  that  is  to  say,  non- 
laughers  ;  men  who  are  in  that  respect  as 
dead  bodies,  which  if  you  prick  them  do  not 
bleed.  The  old  grey  boulder-stone  that  has 
finished  its  peregrination  from  the  rock  to 
the  valley,  is  as  easily  to  be  set  rolling  up 
again  as  these  men  laughing.  No  collision 
of  circumstances  in  our  mortal  career  strikes 
a  light  for  them.  It  is  but  one  step  from 
being  agelastic  to  misogelastic,  and  the  fiiao- 
76Xw9,  the  laughter-hating,  soon  learns  to 
dignify  his  dislike  as  an  objection  in  morality. 

We   have   another  class  of  men,  who   are 


10  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

pleased  to  consider  themselves  antagonists  of 
the  foregoing,  and  whom  we  may  term  hyper- 
gelasts ;  the  excessive  laughers,  ever-laughing, 
who  are  as  clappers  of  a  bell,  that  may  be 
rung  by  a  breeze,  a  grimace ;  who  are  so 
loosely  put  together  that  a  wink  will  shake 
them. 

'.  .  .  C'est  n'estimer  rien  qu'estimer  tout  le  monde/ 

and  to  laugh  at  everything  is  to  have  no 
appreciation  of  the  Comic  of  Comedy. 

Neither  of  these  distinct  divisions  of  non- 
laughers  and  over-laughers  would  be  enter- 
tained by  reading  The  Rape  of  the  Lock, 
or  seeing  a  performance  of  Le  Tartuffe.  In 
relation  to  the  stage,  they  have  taken  in  our 
land  the  form  and  title  of  Puritan  and 
Bacchanalian.  For  though  the  stage  is  no 
longer  a  public  offender,  and  Shakespeare  has 
been  revived  on  it,  to  give  it  nobility,  we  have 
not  yet  entirely  raised  it  above  the  contention 
of  these  two  parties.  Our  speaking  on  the 
theme    of    Comedy    will    appear    almost    a 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  11 

libertine  proceeding  to  one,  while  the  other 
will  think  that  the  speaking  of  it  seriously 
brings  us  into  violent  contrast  with  the 
subject. 

Comedy,  we  have  to  admit,  was  never  one 
of  the  most  honoured  of  the  Muses.  She  was 
in  her  origin,  short  of  slaughter,  the  loudest 
expression  of  the  little  civilization  of  men. 
The  light  of  Athene  over  the  head  of  Achilles 
illuminates  the  birth  of  Greek  Tragedy.  But 
Comedy  rolled  in  shouting  under  the  divine 
protection  of  the  Son  of  the  Wine-jar,  as 
Dionysus  is  made  to  proclaim  himself  by 
Aristophanes.  Our  second  Charles  was  the 
patron,  of  like  benignity,  of  our  Comedy 
of  Manners,  which  began  similarly  as  a  com- 
bative performance,  under  a  licence  to  deride 
and  outrage  the  Puritan,  and  was  here  and 
there  Bacchanalian  beyond  the  Aristophanic 
example :  worse,  inasmuch  as  a  cynical  licen- 
tiousness is  more  abominable  than  frank  filth. 
An  eminent  Frenchman  judges  from  the 
quality  of  some  of  the  stuff  dredged   up  for 


12  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

the  laughter  of  men  and  women  who  sat 
through  an  Athenian  Comic  play,  that  they 
could  have  had  small  delicacy  in  other  affairs 
when  they  had  so  little  in  their  choice  of 
entertainment.  Perhaps  he  does  not  make 
sufficient  allowance  for  the  regulated  licence 
of  plain  speaking  proper  to  the  festival  of 
the  god,  and  claimed  by  the  Comic  poet  as 
his  inalienable  right,  or  for  the  fact  that  it 
was  a  festival  in  a  season  of  licence,  in  a  city 
accustomed  to  give  ear  to  the  boldest  utter- 
ance of  both  sides  of  a  case.  However  that 
may  be,  there  can  be  no  question  that  the 
men  and  women  who  sat  through  the  acting 
of  Wycherley's  Country  Wife  were  past 
blushing.  Our  tenacity  of  national  impres- 
sions has  caused  the  word  theatre  since  then 
to  prod  the  Puritan  nervous  system  like  a 
Satanic  instrument;  just  as  one  has  known 
Anti-Papists,  for  whom  Smithfield  was  re- 
dolent of  a  sinister  smoke,  as  though  they 
had  a  later  recollection  of  the  place  than  the 
lowing  herds.     Hereditary  Puritanism,  regard- 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  IS 

ing  the  stage,  is  met,  to  this  day,  in  many 
families  quite  undistinguished  by  arrogant 
piety.  It  has  subsided  altogether  as  a  power 
in  the  profession  of  morality;  but  it  is  an 
error  to  suppose  it  extinct,  and  unjust  also  to 
forget  that  it  had  once  good  reason  to  hate, 
shun,  and  rebuke  our  public  shows. 

We  shall  find  ourselves  about  where  the 
Comic  spirit  would  place  us,  if  we  stand 
at  middle  distance  between  the  inveterate 
opponents  and  the  drum-and-fife  supporters 
of  Comedy :  '  Comme  un  point  fixe  fait  re- 
marquer  Temportement  des  autres,'  as  Pascal 
says.  And  were  there  more  in  this  position, 
Comic  genius  would  flourish. 

Our  English  idea  of  a  Comedy  of  Manners 
might  be  imaged  in  the  person  of  a  blowsy 
country  girl — say  Hoyden,  the  daughter  of 
Sir  Tunbelly  Clumsy,  who,  when  at  home, 
'  never  disobeyed  her  father  except  in  the 
eating  of  green  gooseberries' — transforming 
to  a  varnished  City  madam ;  with  a  loud 
laugh  and  a  mincing  step ;  the  crazy  ancestress 


14  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

of  an  accountably  fallen  descendant.  She 
bustles  prodigiously  and  is  punctually  smart 
in  her  speech,  always  in  a  fluster  to  escape 
from  Dulness,  as  they  say  the  dogs  on  the 
Nile-banks  drink  at  the  river  running  to  avoid 
the  crocodile.  If  the  monster  catches  her,  as 
at  times  he  does,  she  whips  him  to  a  froth, 
so  that  those  who  know  Dulness  only  as  a 
thing  of.  ponderousness,  shall  fail  to  recognise 
him  in  that  light  and  airy  shape. 

When  she  has  frolicked  through  her  five 
Acts  to  surprise  you  with  the  information 
that  Mr.  Aimwell  is  converted  by  a  sudden 
death  in  the  world  outside  the  scenes  into 
Lord  Aimwell,  and  can  marry  the  lady  in 
the  light  of  day,  it  is  to  the  credit  of  her 
vivacious  nature  that  she  does  not  anticipate 
your  calling  her  Farce.  Five  is  dignity  with 
a  trailing  robe ;  whereas  one,  two,  or  three 
Acts  would  be  short  skirts,  and  degrading. 
Advice  has  been  given  to  householders,  that 
they  should  follow  up  the  shot  at  a  burglar 
in   the  dark  by  hurling  the  pistol   after  it. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  15 

so  that  if  the  bullet  misses,  the  weapon  may 
strike  and  assure  the  rascal  he  has  it.  The 
point  of  her  wit  is  in  this  fashion  supple- 
mented by  the  rattle  of  her  tongue,  and 
effectively,  according  to  the  testimony  of  her 
admirers.  Her  wit  is  at  once,  like  steam  in 
an  engine,  the  motive  force  and  the  warning 
whistle  of  her  headlong  course;  and  it  vanishes 
like  the  track  of  steam  when  she  has  reached 
her  terminus,  never  troubling  the  brains  after- 
wards ;  a  merit  that  it  shares  with  good  wine, 
to  the  joy  of  the  Bacchanalians.  As  to  this 
wit,  it  is  warlike.  In  the  neatest  hands  it 
is  like  the  sword  of  the  cavalier  in  the  Mall, 
quick  to  flash  out  upon  slight  provocation, 
and  for  a  similar  office — to  wound.  Com- 
monly its  attitude  is  entirely  pugilistic  ;  two 
blunt  fists  rallying  and  countering.  When 
harmless,  as  when  the  word  'fooP  occurs,  or 
allusions  to  the  state  of  husband,  it  has  the 
sound  of  the  smack  of  harlequin's  wand  upon 
clown,  and  is  to  the  same  extent  exhilarating. 
Believe  that  idle  empty  laughter  is  the  most 


16  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

desirable  of  recreations,  and  significant  Comedy 
will  seem  pale  and  shallow  in  comparison. 
Our  popular  idea  would  be  hit  by  the  sculp- 
tured group  of  Laughter  holding  both  his 
sides,  while  Comedy  pummels,  by  way  of 
tickling  him.  As  to  a  meaning,  she  holds 
that  it  does  not  conduce  to  making  merry: 
you  might  as  well  carry  cannon  on  a  racing- 
yacht.  Morality  is  a  duenna  to  be  circum- 
vented. This  was  the  view  of  English  Comedy 
of  a  sagacious  essayist,  who  said  that  the  end 
of  a  Comedy  would  often  be  the  commence- 
ment of  a  Tragedy,  were  the  curtain  to 
rise  again  on  the  performers.  In  those  old 
days  female  modesty  was  protected  by  a  fan, 
behind  which,  and  it  was  of  a  convenient 
semicircular  breadth,  the  ladies  present  in  the 
theatre  retired  at  a  signal  of  decorum,  to 
peep,  covertly  askant,  or  with  the  option  of  so 
peeping,  through  a  prettily  fringed  eyelet- 
hole  in  the  eclipsing  arch. 

'  Ego  limis  specto  sic  per  flabellum  clanculum.' — 

Terence. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  17 

That  fan  is  the  flag  and  symbol  of  the  society 
giving  us  our  so-called  Comedy  of  Manners, 
or  Comedy  of  the  manners  of  South-sea 
Islanders  under  city  veneer ;  and  as  to  Comic 
idea,  vacuous  as  the  mask  without  the  face 
behind  it. 

Elia,  whose  humour  delighted  in  floating 
a  galleon  paradox  and  wafting  it  as  far  as  it 
would  go,  bewails  the  extinction  of  our  arti- 
ficial Comedy,  like  a  poet  sighing  over  the 
vanished  splendour  of  Cleopatra's  Nile-barge ; 
and  the  sedateness  of  his  plea  for  a  cause 
condemned  even  in  his  time  to  the  peniten- 
tiary, is  a  novel  eff'ect  of  the  ludicrous.  When 
the  realism  of  those  '  fictitious  half-believed 
personages,'  as  he  calls  them,  had  ceased  to 
strike,  they  were  objectionable  company,  un- 
caressable  as  puppets.  Their  artifices  are 
staringly  naked,  and  have  now  the  eff*ect  of 
a  painted  face  viewed,  after  warm  hours  of 
dancing,  in  the  morning  light.  How  could 
the  Lure  wells  and  the  Plyants  ever  have  been 
praised  for  ingenuity  in  wickedness.?     Critics, 


18  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

apparently  sober,  and  of  high  reputation,  held 
up  their  shallow  knaveries  for  the  world  to 
admire.  These  Lurewells,  Plyants,  Pinch- 
wifes,  Fondlewifes,  Miss  Prue,  Peggy,  Hoyden, 
all  of  them  save  charming  Milamant,  are  dead 
as  last  year's  clothes  in  a  fashionable  fine 
lady's  wardrobe,  and  it  must  be  an  exception- 
ably  abandoned  Abigail  of  our  period  that 
would  look  on  them  with  the  wish  to  appear 
in  their  likeness.  Whether  the  puppet  show 
of  Punch  and  Judy  inspires  our  street- urchins 
to  have  instant  recourse  to  their  fists  in  a 
dispute,  after  the  fashion  of  every  one  of  the 
actors  in  that  public  entertainment  who  gets 
possession  of  the  cudgel,  is  open  to  question : 
it  has  been  hinted ;  and  angry  moralists  have 
traced  the  national  taste  for  tales  of  crime 
to  the  smell  of  blood  in  our  nursery-songs.  It 
will  at  any  rate  hardly  be  questioned  that  it 
is  unwholesome  for  men  and  women  to  see 
themselves  as  they  are,  if  they  are  no  better 
than  they  should  be :  and  they  will  not,  when 
they  have  improved  in  manners,  care  much  to 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  19 

see  themselves  as  they  once  were.  That  comes 
of  reahsm  in  the  Comic  art;  and  it  is  not 
pubhc  caprice,  but  the  consequence  of  a  bet- 
tering state.^  The  same  of  an  immoral  may 
be  said  of  realistic  exhibitions  of  a  vulgar 
society. 

The  French  make  a  critical  distinction  in 
ce  qui  remue  from  ce  qui  ^meut — that  which 
agitates  from  that  which  touches  with  emo- 
tion. In  the  realistic  comedy  it  is  an  incessant 
remuage — no  calm,  merely  bustling  figures, 
and  no  thought.  Excepting  Congreve's  Way 
of  the  World,  which  failed  on  the  stage,  there 
was  nothing  to  keep  our  comedy  alive  on  its 
merits ;  neither,  with  all  its  realism,  true  por- 
traiture, nor  much  quotable  fun,  nor  idea; 
neither  salt  nor  soul. 

The  French  have  a  school  of  stately  comedy 
to  which  they  can  fly  for  renovation  whenever 
they   have   fallen   away   from   it ;    and   their 

1  Realism  in  the  writing  is  carried  to  such  a  pitch  in 
The  Old  Bachelor,  that  husband  and  wife  use  imbecile 
connubial  epithets  to  one  another. 


20  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

having  such  a  school  is  mainly  the  reason 
why,  as  John  Stuart  Mill  pointed  out,  they 
know  men  and  women  more  accurately  than 
we  do.  Moliere  followed  the  Horatian  pre- 
cept, to  observe  the  manners  of  his  age  and 
give  his  characters  the  colour  befitting  them 
at  the  time.  He  did  not  paint  in  raw  realism. 
He  seized  his  characters  firmly  for  the  central 
purpose  of  the  play,  stamped  them  in  the 
idea,  and  by  slightly  raising  and  softening  the 
object  of  study  (as  in.  the  case  of  the  ex- 
Huguenot,  Duke  de  Montausier,^  for  the 
study  of  the  Misanthrope,  and,  according  to 
St.  Simon,  the  Abbe  Roquette  for  Tartuffe), 
generalized  upon  it  so  as  to  make  it  per- 
manently human.  Concede  that  it  is  natural 
for  human  creatures  to  live  in  society,  and 
Alceste  is  an  imperishable  mark  of  one,  though 
he  is  drawn  in  light  outline,  without  any 
forcible  human  colouring.  Our  English  school 
has  not  clearly  imagined  society ;  and  of  the 

^  Tallemant  des  Re'aux^  in  his  rough  portrait  of  the 
Duke,  shows  the  foundation  of  the  character  of  Alceste. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  21 

mind  hovering  above  congregated  men  and 
women,  it  has  imagined  nothing.  The  critics 
who  praise  it  for  its  downrightness,  and  for 
bringing  the  situations  home  to  us,  as  they 
admiringly  say,  cannot  but  disapprove  of 
MoHere''s  comedy,  which  appeals  to  the  indi- 
vidual mind  to  perceive  and  participate  in  the 
social.  We  have  splendid  tragedies,  we  have 
the  most  beautiful  of  poetic  plays,  and  we 
have  literary  comedies  passingly  pleasant  to 
read,  and  occasionally  to  see  acted.  By 
literary  comedies,  I  mean  comedies  of  classic 
inspiration,  drawn  chiefly  from  Menander  and 
the  Greek  New  Comedy  through  Terence; 
or  else  comedies  of  the  poet's  personal  con- 
ception, that  have  had  no  model  in  life,  and 
are  humorous  exaggerations,  happy  or  other- 
wise. These  are  the  comedies  of  Ben  Jonson, 
Massinger,  and  Fletcher.  Massinger's  Justice 
Greedy  we  can  all  of  us  refer  to  a  type,  '  with 
fat  capon  lined **  that  has  been  and  will  be; 
and  he  would  be  comic,  as  Panurge  is  comic, 
but  only  a  Rabelais  could  set  him   moving 


22  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

with  real  animation.  Probably  Justice  Greedy 
would  be  comic  to  the  audience  of  a  country 
booth  and  to  some  of  our  friends.  If  we  have 
lost  our  youthful  relish  for  the  presentation 
of  characters  put  together  to  fit  a  type,  we 
find  it  hard  to  put  together  the  mechanism  of 
a  civil  smile  at  his  enumeration  of  his  dishes. 
Something  of  the  same  is  to  be  said  of  Boba- 
dil,  swearing  '  by  the  foot  of  Pharaoh ' ;  with 
a  reservation,  for  he  is  made  to  move  faster, 
and  to  act.  The  comic  of  Jonson  is  a  scholar's 
excogitation  of  the  comic  ;  that  of  Massinger 
a  moralist's. 

Shakespeare  is  a  well-spring  of  characters 
which  are  saturated  with  the  comic  spirit; 
with  more  of  what  we  will  call  blood-life 
than  is  to  be  found  anywhere  out  of  Shake- 
speare ;  and  they  are  of  this  world,  but  they 
are  of  the  world  enlarged  to  our  embrace 
by  imagination,  and  by  great  poetic  imagina- 
tion. They  are,  as  it  were — I  put  it  to  suit 
my  present  comparison  —  creatures  of  the 
woods   and  wilds,  not   in  walled   towns,  not 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  23 

grouped  and  toned  to  pursue  a  comic  exhibi- 
tion of  the  narrower  world  of  society.  Jaques, 
FalstafF  and  his  regiment,  the  varied  troop 
of  Clowns,  Malvolio,  Sir  Hugh  Evans  and 
Fluellen — marvellous  Welshmen  !  —  Benedict 
and  Beatrice,  Dogberry,  and  the  rest,  are 
subjects  of  a  special  study  in  the  poetically 
comic. 

His  Comedy  of  incredible  imbroglio  belongs 
to  the  literary  section.  One  may  conceive 
that  there  was  a  natural  resemblance  between 
him  and  Menander,  both  in  the  scheme  and 
style  of  his  lighter  plays.  Had  Shakespeare 
lived  in  a  later  and  less  emotional,  less 
heroical  period  of  our  history,  he  might  have 
turned  to  the  painting  of  manners  as  well 
as  humanity.  Euripides  would  probably,  in 
the  time  of  Menander,  when  Athens  was 
enslaved  but  prosperous,  have  lent  his  hand 
to  the  composition  of  romantic  comedy.  He 
certainly  inspired  that  fine  genius. 

Politically  it  is  accounted  a  misfortune  for 
France  that  her  nobles  thronged  to  the  Court 


24  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

of  Louis  Quatorze.  It  was  a  boon  to  the 
comic  poet.  He  had  that  lively  quicksilver 
world  of  the  animalcule  passions,  the  huge 
pretensions,  the  placid  absurdities,  under  his 
eyes  in  full  activity;  vociferous  quacks  and 
snapping  dupes,  hypocrites,  posturers,  extra- 
vagants,  pedants,  rose-pink  ladies  and  mad 
grammarians,  sonneteering  marquises,  high- 
flying mistresses,  plain-minded  maids,  inter- 
threading  as  in  a  loom,  noisy  as  at  a  fair. 
A  simply  bourgeois  circle  will  not  furnish  it, 
for  the  middle  class  must  have  the  brilliant, 
flippant,  independent  upper  for  a  spur  and 
a  pattern ;  otherwise  it  is  likely  to  be  in- 
wardly dull  as  well  as  outwardly  correct. 
Yet,  though  the  King  was  benevolent  toward 
Moliere,  it  is  not  to  the  French  Court  that 
we  are  indebted  for  his  unrivalled  studies 
of  mankind  in  society.  For  the  amusement 
of  the  Court  the  ballets  and  farces  were 
written,  which  are  dearer  to  the  rabble 
upper,  as  to  the  rabble  lower,  class  than 
intellectual  comedy.     The  French  bourgeoisie 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  25 

of  Paris  were  sufficiently  quick-witted  and 
enlightened  by  education  to  welcome  great 
works  like  Le  Tartuffe,  Les  Femmes  Savantes, 
and  Le  Misanthrope,  works  that  were  peril- 
ous ventures  on  the  popular  intelligence, 
big  vessels  to  launch  on  streams  running  to 
shallows.  The  TartufFe  hove  into  view  as 
an  enemy''s  vessel ;  it  offended,  not  Dieu 
mais  les  divots,  as  the  Prince  de  Conde 
explained  the  cabal  raised  against  it  to  the 
King. 

The  Femmes  Savantes  is  a  capital  instance 
of  the  uses  of  comedy  in  teaching  the 
world  to  understand  what  ails  it.  The 
farce  of  the  Precieuses  ridiculed  and  put  a 
stop  to  the  monstrous  romantic  jargon  made 
popular  by  certain  famous  novels.  The 
comedy  of  the  Femmes  Savantes  exposed 
the  later  and  less  apparent  but  more  finely 
comic  absurdity  of  an  excessive  purism  in 
grammar  and  diction,  and  the  tendency  to 
be  idiotic  in  precision.  The  French  had 
felt  the  burden   of  this   new   nonsense:   but 


26  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

they  had  to  see  the  comedy  several  times 
before  they  were  consoled  in  their  suffering 
by  seeing  the  cause  of  it  exposed. 

The  Misanthrope  was  yet  more  frigidly 
received.  Moliere  thought  it  dead.  'I  can- 
not improve  on  it,  and  assuredly  never  shall,"* 
he  said.  It  is  one  of  the  French  titles  to 
honour  that  this  quintessential  comedy  of 
the  opposition  of  Alceste  and  Celimene  was 
ultimately  understood  and  applauded.  In 
all  countries  the  middle  class  presents  the 
public  which,  fighting  the  world,  and  with 
a  good  footing  in  the  fight,  knows  the  world 
best.  It  may  be  the  most  selfish,  but  that 
is  a  question  leading  us  into  sophistries. 
Cultivated  men  and  women,  who  do  not 
skim  the  cream  of  life,  and  are  attached  to 
the  duties,  yet  escape  the  harsher  blows, 
make  acute  and  balanced  observers.  Moliere 
is  their  poet. 

Of  this  class  in  England,  a  large  body, 
neither  Puritan  nor  Bacchanalian,  have  a 
sentimental    objection   to   face   the   study   of 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  27 

the  actual  world.     They  take  up  disdain  of 
it,  when  its  truths  appear  humiliating :  when 
the    facts    are    not    immediately    forced    on 
them,  they  take  up  the  pride  of  incredulity. 
They  live   in   a   hazy  atmosphere   that   they 
suppose    an    ideal    one.      Humorous  writing 
they    will    endure,    perhaps    approve,    if    it 
mingles   with   pathos   to   shake    and    elevate 
the  feelings.      They   approve   of  Satire,   be- 
cause, like  the  beak  of  the  vulture,  it  smells 
of    carrion,   which    they   are    not.      But    of 
Comedy   they    have    a    shivering    dread,    for 
Comedy  enfolds  them  with  the  wretched  host 
of  the   world,  huddles  them   with   us   all   in 
an  ignoble  assimilation,  and   cannot  be  used 
by   any   exalted  variety  as  a  scourge  and  a 
broom.      Nay,   to   be   an   exalted   variety   is 
to  come   under  the  calm  curious  eye  of  the 
Comic   spirit,  and   be   probed   for   what   you 
are.      Men   are   seen  among  them,  and  very 
many   cultivated   women.      You  may  distin- 
guish them  by  a   favourite   phrase:    'Surely 
we   are   not   so   bad!'   and   the   remark:   'If 


28  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

that  is  human  nature,  save  us  from  it !  "*  as 
if  it  could  be  done :  but  in  the  peculiar 
Paradise  of  the  wilful  people  who  will  not 
see,  the  exclamation  assumes  the  saving 
grace. 

Yet  should  you  ask  them  whether  they 
dislike  sound  sense,  they  vow  they  do  not. 
And  question  cultivated  women  whether  it 
pleases  them  to  be  shown  moving  on  an 
intellectual  level  with  men,  they  will  answer 
that  it  does ;  numbers  of  them  claim  the 
situation.  Now,  Comedy  is  the  fountain  of 
sound  sense;  not  the  less  perfectly  sound 
on  account  of  the  sparkle:  and  Comedy 
lifts  women  to  a  station  offering  them  free 
play  for  their  wit,  as  they  usually  show  it, 
when  they  have  it,  on  the  side  of  sound 
sense.  The  higher  the  Comedy,  the  more 
prominent  the  part  they  enjoy  in  it.  Dorine 
in  the  Tartuffe  is  common-sense  incarnate, 
though  palpably  a  waiting-maid.  Celimene 
is  undisputed  mistress  of  the  same  attribute 
in  the  Misanthrope ;  wiser  as  a  woman  than 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  29 

Alceste  as  man.  In  Congreve's  Way  of  the 
World,  Millamant  overshadows  Mirabel,  the 
sprightliest  male  figure  of  English  comedy. 

But  those  two  ravishing  women,  so  copious 
and  so  choice  of  speech,  who  fence  with  men 
and  pass  their  guard,  are  heartless !  Is  it 
not  preferable  to  be  the  pretty  idiot,  the 
passive  beauty,  the  adorable  bundle  of  ca- 
prices, very  feminine,  very  sympathetic,  of 
romantic  and  sentimental  fiction?  Our 
women  are  taught  to  think  so.  The  Agnes 
of  the  Ecole  des  Femmes  should  be  a  lesson 
for  men.  The  heroines  of  Comedy  are  like 
women  of  the  world,  not  necessarily  heartless 
from  being  clear-sighted :  they  seem  so  to 
the  sentimentally-reared  only  for  the  reason 
that  they  use  their  wits,  and  are  not  wan- 
dering vessels  crying  for  a  captain  or  a  pilot. 
Comedy  is  an  exhibition  of  their  battle  with 
men,  and  that  of  men  with  them :  and  as 
the  two,  however  divergent,  both  look  on 
one  object,  namely.  Life,  the  gradual  simi- 
larity of  their  impressions  must  bring  them 


so  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

to  some  resemblance.  The  Comic  poet  dares 
to  show  us  men  and  women  coming  to  this 
mutual  likeness;  he  is  for  saying  that  when 
they  draw  together  in  social  life  their  minds 
grow  liker;  just  as  the  philosopher  discerns 
the  similarity  of  boy  and  girl,  until  the  girl 
is  marched  away  to  the  nursery.  Philosopher 
and  Comic  poet  are  of  a  cousinship  in  the 
eye  they  cast  on  life:  and  they  are  equally 
unpopular  with  our  wilful  English  of  the 
hazy  region  and  the  ideal  that  is  not  to  be 
disturbed. 

Thus,  for  want  of  instruction  in  the  Comic 
idea,  we  lose  a  large  audience  among  our 
cultivated  middle  class  that  we  should  ex- 
pect to  support  Comedy.  The  sentimentalist 
is  as  averse  as  the  Puritan  and  as  the 
Bacchanalian. 

Our  traditions  are  unfortunate.  The  public 
taste  is  with  the  idle  laughers,  and  still  in- 
clines to  follow  them.  It  may  be  shown  by 
an  analysis  of  Wycherley''s  Plain  Dealer,  a 
coarse   prose   adaption   of   the    Misanthrope, 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  31 

stuffed  with  lumps  of  realism  in  a  vulgarized 
theme  to  hit  the  mark  of  English  appe- 
tite, that  we  have  in  it  the  keynote  of  the 
Comedy  of  our  stage.  It  is  Moliere  tra- 
vestied, with  the  hoof  to  his  foot  and  hair 
on  the  pointed  tip  of  his  ear.  And  how  diffi- 
cult it  is  for  writers  to  disentangle  themselves 
from  bad  traditions  is  noticeable  when  we  find 
Goldsmith,  who  had  grave  command  of  the 
Comic  in  narrative,  producing  an  elegant 
farce  for  a  Comedy;  and  Fielding,  who  was 
a  master  of  the  Comic  both  in  narrative  and 
in  dialogue,  not  even  approaching  to  the  pre- 
sentable in  farce. 

These  bad  traditions  of  Comedy  affect  us 
not  only  on  the  stage,  but  in  our  literature, 
and  may  be  tracked  into  our  social  life. 
They  are  the  ground  of  the  heavy  moralizings 
by  which  we  are  outwearied,  about  Life  as  a 
Comedy,  and  Comedy  as  a  jade,^  when  popular 

1  See  Tom  Joiies^  book  viii.  chapter  1,  for  Fielding's 
opinion  of  our  Comedy.  But  he  puts  it  simply ;  not 
as  an  exercise  in  the  quasi-philosophical  bathetic. 


32  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

writers,  conscious  of  fatigue  in  creativeness, 
desire  to  be  cogent  in  a  modish  cynicism : 
perversions  of  the  idea  of  life,  and  of 
the  proper  esteem  for  the  society  we  have 
wrested  from  brutishness,  and  would  carry 
higher.  Stock  images  of  this  description  are 
accepted  by  the  timid  and  the  sensitive,  as 
well  as  by  the  saturnine,  quite  seriously ;  for 
not  many  look  abroad  with  their  own  eyes, 
fewer  still  have  the  habit  of  thinking  for 
themselves.  Life,  we  know  too  well,  is  not  a 
Comedy,  but  something  strangely  mixed; 
nor  is  Comedy  a  vile  mask.  The  corrupted 
importation  from  France  was  noxious ;  a  noble 
entertainment  spoilt  to  suit  the  wretched 
taste  of  a  villanous  age ;  and  the  later  imita- 
tions of  it,  partly  drained  of  its  poison  and 
made  decorous,  became  tiresome,  notwith- 
standing their  fun,  in  the  perpetual  recurring 
of  the  same  situations,  owing  to  the  absence 
of  original  study  and  vigour  of  conception. 
Scene  v.  Act  2  of  the  Misanthrope,  owing,  no 
doubt,  to  the  fact  of  our  not  producing  matter 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  SS 

for  original  study,  is  repeated  in  succession 
by  Wycherley,  Congreve,  and  Sheridan,  and  as 
it  is  at  second  hand,  we  have  it  done  cynically 
— or  such  is  the  tone ;  in  the  manner  of  *  below 
stairs.'  Comedy  thus  treated  may  be  ac- 
cepted as  a  version  of  the  ordinary  worldly 
understanding  of  our  social  life ;  at  least,  in 
accord  with  the  current  dicta  concerning  it. 
The  epigrams  can  be  made;  but  it  is  un- 
instructive,  rather  tending  to  do  disservice. 
Comedy  justly  treated,  as  you  find  it  in 
Moliere,  whom  we  so  clownishly  mishandled, 
the  Comedy  of  Moliere  throws  no  infamous  re- 
flection upon  life.  It  is  deeply  conceived,  in  the 
first  place,  and  therefore  it  cannot  be  impure. 
Meditate  on  that  statement.  Never  did  man 
wield  so  shrieking  a  scourge  upon  vice,  but  his 
consummate  self-mastery  is  not  shaken  while 
administering  it.  TartufFe  and  Harpagon,  in 
fact,  are  made  each  to  whip  himself  and  his 
class,  the  false  pietists,  and  the  insanely  covet- 
ous. Moliere  has  only  set  them  in  motion. 
He    strips   Folly   to    the   skin,   displays   the 


S4  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

imposture  of  the  creature,  and  is  content  to 
offer  her  better  clothing,  with  the  lesson 
Chrysale  reads  to  Philaminte  and  Belise.  He 
conceives  purely,  and  he  writes  purely,  in  the 
simplest  language,  the  simplest  of  French  verse. 
The  source  of  his  wit  is  clear  reason :  it  is  a 
fountain  of  that  soil ;  and  it  springs  to  vin- 
dicate reason,  common-sense,  rightness  and 
justice  ;  for  no  vain  purpose  ever.  The  wit  is 
of  such  pervading  spirit  that  it  inspires  a 
pun  with  meaning  and  interest.^  His  moral 
does  not  hang  like  a  tail,  or  preach  from  one 
character  incessantly  cocking  an  eye  at  the 
audience,  as  in  recent  realistic  French  Plays  : 
but  is  in  the  heart  of  his  work,  throbbing  with 
every  pulsation  of  an  organic  structure.  If 
Life  is  likened  to  the  comedy  of  Moliere,  there 
is  no  scandal  in  the  comparison. 

^  Femmes  Savantes  : 

Belise  :  Veux-tu  toute  la  vie  ofFenser  la  gram- 
maire  ? 

Martine:  Qui  parle  d'oflFenser  grand'mere  ni 
grand-pere  ? ' 

The  pun  is  delivered  in  all  sincerity,  from  the  mouth 
of  a  rustic. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  35 

Congreve's  Way  of  the  World  is  an  excep- 
tion to  our  other  comedies,  his  own  among 
them,  by  virtue  of  the  remarkable  brilliancy 
of  the  writing,  and  the  figure  of  Millamant. 
The  comedy  has  no  idea  in  it,  beyond  the 
stale  one,  that  so  the  world  goes ;  and  it  con- 
cludes with  the  jaded  discovery  of  a  document 
at  a  convenient  season  for  the  descent  of  the 
curtain.  A  plot  was  an  afterthought  with 
Congreve.  By  the  help  of  a  wooden  villain 
(Maskwell)  marked  Gallows  to  the  flattest  eye, 
he  gets  a  sort  of  plot  in  The  Double  Dealer.^ 
His  Way  of  the  World  might  be  called  The 
Conquest  of  a  Town  Coquette,  and  Millamant 
is  a  perfect  portrait  of  a  coquette,  both  in  her 
resistance^to  Mirabel  and  the  manner  of  her 
surrender,  and  also  in  her  tongue.  The  wit 
here  is  not  so  salient  as  in  certain  passages  of 

1  Maskwell  seems  to  have  been  carved  on  the  model 
of  lago^  as  by  the  hand  of  an  enterprising  urchin.  He 
apostrophizes  his  '  invention '  repeatedly.  '  Thanks, 
my  invention.'  He  hits  on  an  invention,  to  say : 
'  Was  it  my  brain  or  Providence.'*  no  matter  which.* 
It  is  no  matter  which,  but  it  was  not  his  brain. 


36  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

Love  for  Love,  where  Valentine  feigns  madness 
or  retorts  on  his  father,  or  Mrs.  Frail  rejoices 
in  the  harmlessness  of  wounds  to  a  woman^s 
virtue,  if  she  '  keeps  them  from  air."  In  The 
Way  of  the  World,  it  appears  less  prepared  in 
the  smartness,  and  is  more  diffused  in  the 
more  characteristic  style  of  the  speakers. 
Here,  however,  as  elsewhere,  his  famous  wit  is 
like  a  bully-fencer,  not  ashamed  to  lay  traps 
for  its  exhibition,  transparently  petulant  for 
the  train  between  certain  ordinary  words  and 
the  powder-magazine  of  the  improprieties  to 
be  fired.  Contrast  the  wit  of  Congreve  with 
Moliere^s.  That  of  the  first  is  a  Toledo  blade, 
sharp,  and  wonderfully  supple  for  steel ;  cast 
for  duelling,  restless  in  the  scabbard,  being  so 
pretty  when  out  of  it.  To  shine,  it  must 
have  an  adversary.  Moliere's  wit  is  like  a 
running  brook,  with  innumerable  fresh  lights 
on  it  at  every  turn  of  the  wood  through  which 
its  business  is  to  find  a  way.  It  does  not  run 
in  search  of  obstructions,  to  be  noisy  over 
them;  but  when  dead  leaves  and  viler  sub- 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  37 

stances  are  heaped  along  the  course,  its  natural 
song  is  heightened.  Without  effort,  and  with 
no  dazzling  flashes  of  achievement,  it  is  full  of 
healing,  the  wit  of  good  breeding,  the  wit  of 
wisdom. 

'  Genuine  humour  and  true  wit,"  says 
Landor,^  '  require  a  sound  and  capacious  mind, 
which  is  always  a  grave  one.  Rabelais  and  La 
Fontaine  are  recorded  by  their  countrymen  to 
have  been  reveurs.  Few  men  have  been  graver 
than  Pascal.     Few  men  have  been  wittier." 

To  apply  the  citation  of  so  great  a  brain  as 
PascaFs  to  our  countryman  would  be  unfair. 
Congreve  had  a  certain  soundness  of  mind  ;  of 
capacity,  in  the  sense  intended  by  Landor,  he 
had  little.  Judging  him  by  his  wit,  he  per- 
formed some  happy  thrusts,  and  taking  it  for 
genuine,  it  is  a  surface  wit,  neither  rising  from 
a  depth  nor  flowing  from  a  spring. 

^ On  voit  qu'il  se  travaille  a  dire  de  bons  mots.' 

He  drives  the   poor  hack  word,  '  fool,"  as 

^  Imaginary  Conversations :  Alfieri  and  the  Jew 
Salomon. 


38  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

cruelly  to  the  market  for  wit  as  any  of  his 
competitors.  Here  is  an  example,  that  has 
been  held  up  for  eulogy  : 

WiTwouD  :  He  has  brought  me  a  letter  from 
the  fool  my  brother,  etc.  etc. 

Mirabel  :  A  fool,  and  your  brother,  Wit- 
woud  ? 

Witwoud:  Ay,  ay,  my  half-brother.  My 
half-brother  he  is ;  no  nearer,  upon  my 
honour. 

Mirabel  :  Then  'tis  possible  he  may  be  but 
half  a  fool. 

By  evident  preparation.  This  is  a  sort  of 
wit  one  remembers  to  have  heard  at  school, 
of  a  brilliant  outsider ;  perhaps  to  have  been 
guilty  of  oneself,  a  trifle  later.  It  was,  no 
doubt,  a  blaze  of  intellectual  fireworks  to  the 
bumpkin  squire,  who  came  to  London  to  go 
to  the  theatre  and  learn  manners. 

Where  Congreve  excels  all  his  English 
rivals  is  in  his  literary  force,  and  a  succinctness 
of  style  peculiar  to  him.  He  had  correct 
judgement,  a  correct  ear,  readiness  of  illustra- 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  39 

tion  within  a  narrow  range,  in  snapshots  of  the 
obvious  at  the  obvious,  and  copious  language. 
He  hits  the  mean  of  a  fine  style  and  a  natural 
in  dialogue.  He  is  at  once  precise  and 
voluble.  If  you  have  ever  thought  upon  style 
you  will  acknowledge  it  to  be  a  signal  accom- 
plishment. In  this  he  is  a  classic,  and  is 
worthy  of  treading  a  measure  with  Moliere. 
The  Way  of  the  World  may  be  read  out  cur- 
rently at  a  first  glance,  so  sure  are  the  accents 
of  the  emphatic  meaning  to  strike  the  eye, 
perforce  of  the  crispness  and  cunning  polish  of 
the  sentences.  You  have  not  to  look  over 
them  before  you  confide  yourself  to  him ;  he 
will  carry  you  safe.  Sheridan  imitated,  but 
was  far  from  surpassing  him.  The  flow  of 
boudoir  Billingsgate  in  Lady  Wishfort  is 
unmatched  for  the  vigour  and  pointedness 
of  the  tongue.  It  spins  along  with  a  final 
ring,  like  the  voice  of  Nature  in  a  fury,  and 
is,  indeed,  racy  eloquence  of  the  elevated 
fishwife. 

Millamant  is  an  admirable,  almost  a  lovable 


40  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

heroine.  It  is  a  piece  of  genius  in  a  writer 
to  make  a  woman's  manner  of  speech  por- 
tray her.  You  feel  sensible  of  her  presence 
in  every  line  of  her  speaking.  The  stipula- 
tions with  her  lover  in  view  of  marriage, 
her  fine  lady's  delicacy,  and  fine  lady's  easy 
evasions  of  indelicacy,  coquettish  airs,  and 
playing  with  irresolution,  which  in  a  com- 
mon maid  would  be  bashfulness,  until  she 
submits  to  '  dwindle  into  a  wife,'  as  she  says, 
form  a  picture  that  lives  in  the  frame,  and 
is  in  harmony  with  Mirabel's  description  of 
her: 

'Here  she  comes,  i'  faith,  full  sail,  with 
her  fan  spread,  and  her  streamers  out,  and 
a  shoal  of  fools  for  tenders.' 

And,  after  an  interview  : 

*  Think  of  you  !  To  think  of  a  whirlwind, 
though  'twere  in  a  whirlwind,  were  a  case 
of  more  steady  contemplation,  a  very  tran- 
quillity of  mind  and  mansion.' 

There  is  a  picturesqueness,  as  of  Millamant 
and   no  other,  in  her  voice,  when  she  is  en- 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  41 

couraged  to  take  Mirabel  by  Mrs.  Fainall, 
who  is  '  sure  she  has  a  mind  to  him  "* : 

MiLLAMANT  :  Are  you  ?  I  think  I  have — 
and  the  horrid  man  looks  as  if  he  thought 
so  too,  etc.  etc. 

One  hears  the  tones,  and  sees  the  sketch 
and  colour  of  the  whole  scene  in  reading 
it. 

Celimene  is  behind  Millamant  in  vividness. 
An  air  of  bewitching  whimsicality  hovers 
over  the  graces  of  this  Comic  heroine,  like 
the  lively  conversational  play  of  a  beautiful 
mouth. 

But  in  wit  she  is  no  rival  of  Celimene. 
What  she  utters  adds  to  her  personal  witchery, 
and  is  not  further  memorable.  She  is  a  flash- 
ing portrait,  and  a  type  of  the  superior  ladies 
who  do  not  think,  not  of  those  who  do.  In 
representing  a  class,  therefore,  it  is  a  lower 
class,  in  the  proportion  that  one  of  Gains- 
borough's full-length  aristocratic  women  is 
below  the  permanent  impressiveness  of  a 
fair  Venetian  head. 


42  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

Millamant  side  by  side  with  Celimene  is 
an  example  of  how  far  the  realistic  painting 
of  a  character  can  be  carried  to  win  our 
favour;  and  of  where  it  falls  short.  Celimene 
is  a  woman's  mind  in  movement,  armed  with 
an  ungovernable  wit ;  with  perspicacious  clear 
eyes  for  the  world,  and  a  very  distinct  know- 
ledge that  she  belongs  to  the  world,  and  is 
most  at  home  in  it.  She  is  attracted  to 
Alceste  by  her  esteem  for  his  honesty ;  she 
cannot  avoid  seeing  where  the  good  sense  of 
the  man  is  diseased. 

Rousseau,  in  his  letter  to  D'Alembert  on 
the  subject  of  the  Misanthrope,  discusses 
the  character  of  Alceste,  as  though  Moliere 
had  put  him  forth  for  an  absolute  example 
of  misanthropy ;  whereas  Alceste  is  only  a 
misanthrope  of  the  circle  he  finds  himself 
placed  in :  he  has  a  touching  faith  in  the 
virtue  residing  in  the  country,  and  a  critical 
love  of  sweet  simpleness.  Nor  is  he  the 
principal  person  of  the  comedy  to  which  he 
gives  a  name.     He  is   only  passively  comic. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  43 

Celimene  is  the  active  spirit.  While  he  is 
denouncing  and  railing,  the  trial  is  imposed 
upon  her  to  make  the  best  of  him,  and 
control  herself,  as  much  as  a  witty  woman, 
eagerly  courted,  can  do.  By  appreciating 
him  she  practically  confesses  her  faultiness, 
and  she  is  better  disposed  to  meet  him  half 
way  than  he  is  to  bend  an  inch :  only  she 
is  une  dme  de  vingt  ans,  the  world  is  plea- 
sant, and  if  the  gilded  flies  of  the  Court 
are  silly,  uncompromising  fanatics  have  their 
ridiculous  features  as  well.  Can  she  aban- 
don the  life  they  make  agreeable  to  her, 
for  a  man  who  will  not  be  guided  by  the 
common  sense  of  his  class;  and  who  insists 
on  plunging  into  one  extreme — equal  to 
suicide  in  her  eyes — to  avoid  another  ?  That 
is  the  comic  question  of  the  Misanthrope. 
Why  will  he  not  continue  to  mix  with  the 
world  smoothly,  appeased  by  the  flattery  of 
her  secret  and  really  sincere  preference  of 
him,  and  taking  his  revenge  in  satire  of  it, 
as   she   does   from   her    own   not    very   lofty 


44  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

standard,  and   will   by  and  by  do  from    his 
more  exalted  one  ? 

Celimene  is  worldliness :  Alceste  is  unworld- 
liness.  It  does  not  quite  imply  unselfishness ; 
and  that  is  perceived  by  her  shrewd  head. 
Still  he  is  a  very  uncommon  figure  in  her 
circle,  and  she  esteems  him,  Thomme  aux 
ruhans  verts^  'who  sometimes  diverts  but 
more  often  horribly  vexes  her,"  as  she  can 
say  of  him  when  her  satirical  tongue  is  on 
the  run.  Unhappily  the  soul  of  truth  in 
him,  which  wins  her  esteem,  refuses  to  be 
tamed,  or  silent,  or  unsuspicious,  and  is  the 
perpetual  obstacle  to  their  good  accord.  He 
is  that  melancholy  person,  the  critic  of  every- 
body save  himself;  intensely  sensitive  to  the 
faults  of  others,  wounded  by  them;  in  love 
with  his  own  indubitable  honesty,  and  with 
his  ideal  of  the  simpler  form  of  life  be- 
fitting it:  qualities  which  constitute  the 
satirist.  He  is  a  Jean  Jacques  of  the  Court. 
His  proposal  to  Celimene  when  he  pardons 
her,    that   she   should    follow   him   in   flying 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  45 

humankind,  and  his  frenzy  of  detestation  of 
her  at  her  refusal,  are  thoroughly  in  the 
mood  of  Jean  Jacques.  He  is  an  impractic- 
able creature  of  a  priceless  virtue;  but  Celi- 
mene  may  feel  that  to  fly  with  him  to  the 
desert :  that  is  from  the  Court  to  the  country 

'  Ou  d'etre  homme  d'honneur  on  ait  la  liberte/ 

she  is  likely  to  find  herself  the  companion 
of  a  starving  satirist,  like  that  poor  princess 
who  ran  away  with  the  waiting-man,  and 
when  both  were  hungry  in  the  forest,  was 
ordered  to  give  him  flesh.  She  is  a  fieffee 
coquette,  rejoicing  in  her  wit  and  her  attrac- 
tions, and  distinguished  by  her  inclination 
for  Alceste  in  the  midst  of  her  many  other 
lovers ;  only  she  finds  it  hard  to  cut  them 
off — what  woman  with  a  train  does  not? — 
and  when  the  exposure  of  her  naughty  wit 
has  laid  her  under  their  rebuke,  she  will  do 
the  utmost  she  can :  she  will  give  her  hand 
to  honesty,  but  she  cannot  quite  abandon 
worldliness.     She  would  be  unwise  if  she  did. 


46  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

The  fable  is  thin.  Our  pungent  contrivers 
of  plots  would  see  no  indication  of  life  in 
the  outlines.  The  life  of  the  comedy  is  in 
the  idea.  As  with  the  singing  of  the  sky- 
lark out  of  sight,  you  must  love  the  bird 
to  be  attentive  to  the  song,  so  in  this 
highest .  flight  of  the  Comic  Muse,  you  must 
love  pure  Comedy  warmly  to  understand  the 
Misanthrope:  you  must  be  receptive  of  the 
idea  of  Comedy.  And  to  love  Comedy  you 
must  know  the  real  world,  and  know  men 
and  women  well  enough  not  to  expect  too 
much  of  them,  though  you  may  still  hope 
for  good. 

Menander  wrote  a  comedy  called  Misogynes, 
said  to  have  been  the  most  celebrated  of  his 
works.  This  misogynist  is  a  married  man, 
according  to  the  fragment  surviving,  and  is 
a  hater  of  women  through  hatred  of  his 
wife.  He  generalizes  upon  them  from  the 
example  of  this  lamentable  adjunct  of  his 
fortunes,  and  seems  to  have  got  the  worst 
of  it  in  the  contest  with  her,  which   is  like 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  47 

the  issue  in  reality,  in  the  polite  world. 
He  seems  also  to  have  deserved  it,  which 
may  be  as  true  to  the  copy.  But  we  are 
unable  to  say  whether  the  wife  was  a  good 
voice  of  her  sex:  or  how  far  Menander  in 
this  instance  raised  the  idea  of  woman  from 
the  mire  it  was  plunged  into  by  the  comic 
poets,  or  rather  satiric  dramatists,  of  the 
middle  period  of  Greek  Comedy  preceding 
him  and  the  New  Comedy,  who  devoted  their 
wit  chiefly  to  the  abuse,  and  for  a  diversity, 
to  the  eulogy  of  extra-mural  ladies  of  con- 
spicuous fame.  Menander  idealized  them 
without  purposely  elevating.  He  satirized 
a  certain  Thais,  and  his  Thais  of  the 
Eunuchus  of  Terence  is  neither  profession- 
ally attractive  nor  repulsive ;  his  picture  of 
the  two  Andrians,  Chrysis  and  her  sister,  is 
nowhere  to  be  matched  for  tenderness.  But 
the  condition  of  honest  women  in  his  day 
did  not  permit  of  the  freedom  of  action  and 
fencing  dialectic  of  a  Celimene,  and  conse- 
quently it  is  below  our  mark  of  pure  Comedy. 


48  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

Sainte-Beuve  conjures  up  the  ghost  of  Menan- 
der,  saying :  For  the  love  of  me  love  Terence. 
It  is  through  love  of  Terence  that  moderns 
are  able  to  love  Menander ;  and  what  is  pre- 
served of  Terence  has  not  apparently  given  us 
the  best  of  the  friend  of  Epicurus.  Mio-ovfievo^ 
the  lover  taken  in  horror,  and  HepLKeipo/jLevrj 
the  damsel  shorn  of  her  locks,  have  a  pro- 
mising sound  for  scenes  of  jealousy  and  a  too 
masterful  display  of  lordly  authority,  leading 
to  regrets,  of  the  kind  known  to  intemperate 
men  who  imagined  they  were  fighting  with 
the  weaker,  as  the  fragments  indicate. 

Of  the  six  comedies  of  Terence,  four  are 
derived  from  Menander;  two,  the  Hecyra 
and  the  Phormio,  from  Apollodorus.  These 
two  are  inferior  in  comic  action  and  the 
peculiar  sweetness  of  Menander  to  the  Andria, 
the  Adelphi,  the  Heautontimorumenus,  and 
the  Eunuchus :  but  Phormio  is  a  more  dash- ' 
ing  and  amusing  convivial  parasite  than  the 
Gnatho  of  the  last-named  comedy.  There 
were  numerous  rivals  of  whom  we  know  next 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  49 

to  nothing — except  by  the  quotations  of 
Athenaeus  and  Plutarch,  and  the  Greek 
grammarians  who  cited  them  to  support  a 
dictum — in  this  as  in  the  preceding  periods 
of  comedy  in  Athens,  for  Menander'*s  plays  are 
counted  by  many  scores,  and  they  were  crowned 
by  the  prize  only  eight  times.  The  favourite 
poet  with  critics,  in  Greece  as  in  Rome,  was 
Menander ;  and  if  some  of  his  rivals  here  and 
there  surpassed  him  in  comic  force,  and  out- 
stripped him  in  competition  by  an  appositeness 
to  the  occasion  that  had  previously  in  the 
same  way  deprived  the  genius  of  Aristophanes 
of  its  due  reward  in  Clouds  and  Birds,  his 
position  as  chief  of  the  comic  poets  of  his  age 
was  unchallenged.  Plutarch  very  unnecessarily 
drags  Aristophanes  into  a  comparison  with 
him,  to  the  confusion  of  the  older  poet.  Their 
aims,  the  matter  they  dealt  in,  and  the  times, 
were  quite  dissimilar.  But  it  is  no  wonder 
that  Plutarch,  writing  when  Athenian  beauty 
of  style  was  the  delight  of  his  patrons,  should 
rank  Menander  at  the  highest.  In  what 
D 


50  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

degree  of  faithfulness  Terence  copied  Menander, 
whether,  as  he  states  of  the  passage  in  the 
Adelphi  taken  from  Diphilus,  verbum  de  verbo 
in  the  lovelier  scenes — the  description  of  the 
last  words  of  the  dying  Andrian,  and  of  her 
funeral,  for  instance — remains  conjectural.  For 
us  Terence  shares  with  his  master  the  praise 
of  an  amenity  that  is  like  Elysian  speech, 
equable  and  ever  gracious ;  like  the  face  of 
the  Andrian's  young  sister  : 

^  Adeo  modestOj  adeo  venusto,  ut  nihil  supra.' 

The  celebrated  'flens  quam  familiariter,'  of 
which  the  closest  rendering  grounds  hopelessly 
on  harsh  prose,  to  express  the  sorrowful  con- 
fidingness  of  a  young  girl  who  has  lost  her 
sister  and  dearest  friend,  and  has  but  her  lover 
left  to  her ;  '  she  turned  and  flung  herself  on 
his  bosom,  weeping  as  though  at  home  there  ■* : 
this  our  instinct  tells  us  must  be  Greek, 
though  hardly  finer  in  Greek.  Certain  lines 
of  Terence,  compared  with  the  original  frag- 
ments, show  that  he  embellished  them ;  but  his 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  51 

taste  was  too  exquisite  for  him  to  do  other 
than  devote  his  genius  to  the  honest  transla- 
tion of  such  pieces  as  the  above.  Menander, 
then  ;  with  him,  through  the  affinity  of  sym- 
pathy, Terence  ;  and  Shakespeare  and  Mohere 
have  this  beautiful  translucency  of  language : 
and  the  study  of  the  comic  poets  might  be 
recommended,  if  for  that  only. 

A  singular  ill  fate  befell  the  writings  of 
Menander.  What  we  have  of  him  in  Terence 
was  chosen  probably  to  please  the  cultivated 
Romans ;  i  and  is  a  romantic  play  with  a  comic 
intrigue,  obtained  in  two  instances,  the  Andria 
and  the  Eunuchus,  by  rolling  a  couple  of  his 
originals  into  one.  The  titles  of  certain  of 
the  lost  plays  indicate  the  comic  illumining 
character;  a  Self-pitier,  a  Self-chastiser,  an 
Ill-tempered  man,  a  Superstitious,  an  Incredu- 
lous, etc.,  point  to  suggestive  domestic  themes. 

1  Terence  did  not  please  the  rough  old  conservative 
Romans  ;  they  liked  Plautus  better,  and  the  recurring 
mention  of  the  vetus  poeta  in  his  prologues,  who 
plagued  him  with  the  crusty  critical  view  of  his  pro- 
ductions, has  in  the  end  a  comic  effect  on  the  reader. 


52  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

Terence  forwarded  manuscript  translations 
from  Greece,  that  suffered  shipwreck  ;  he,  who 
could  have  restored  the  treasure,  died  on  the 
way  home.  The  zealots  of  Byzantium  com- 
pleted the  work  of  destruction.  So  we  have 
the  four  comedies  of  Terence,  numbering  six 
of  Menander,  with  a  few  sketches  of  plots — 
one  of  them,  the  Thesaurus,  introduces  a  miser, 
whom  we  should  have  liked  to  contrast  with 
Harpagon — and  a  multitude  of  small  frag- 
ments of  a  sententious  cast,  fitted  for  quota- 
tion. Enough  remains  to  make  his  greatness 
felt. 

Without  undervaluing  other  writers  of 
Comedy,  I  think  it  may  be  said  that  Menander 
and  Moliere  stand  alone  specially  as  comic 
poets  of  the  feelings  and  the  idea.  In  each  of 
them  there  is  a  conception  of  the  Comic  that 
refines  even  to  pain,  as  in  the  Menedemus  of 
the  Heautontimorumenus,  and  in  the  Misan- 
thrope. Menander  and  Moliere  have  given 
the  principal  types  to  Comedy  hitherto.  The 
Micio  and  Demea  of  the  Adelphi,  with  their 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  53 

opposing  views  of  the  proper  management  of 
youth,  are  still  alive;  the  Sganarelles  and 
Arnolphes  of  the  Ecole  des  Maris  and  the 
Ecole  des  Femmes,  are  not  all  buried.  Tartuffe 
is  the  father  of  the  hypocrites ;  Orgon  of  the 
dupes ;  Thraso,  of  the  braggadocios ;  Alceste 
of  the  '  Manlys " ;  Davus  and  Syrus  of  the 
intriguing  valets,  the  Scapins  and  Figaros. 
Ladies  that  soar  in  the  realms  of  Rose-Pink, 
whose  language  wears  the  nodding  plumes  of 
intellectual  conceit,  are  traceable  to  Philaminte 
and  Belise  of  the  Femmes  Savantes ;  and  the 
mordant  witty  women  have  the  tongue  of 
Celimene.  The  reason  is,  that  these  two 
poets  idealized  upon  life:  the  foundation  of 
their  types  is  real  and  in  the  quick,  but  they 
painted  with  spiritual  strength,  which  is  the 
solid  in  Art. 

The  idealistic  conception  of  Comedy  gives 
breadth  and  opportunities  of  daring  to  Comic 
genius,  and  helps  to  solve  the  difficulties  it 
creates.  How,  for  example,  shall  an  audience 
be  assured  that  an  evident  and  monstrous  dupe 


54  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

is  actually  deceived  without  being  an  absolute 
fool  ?  In  Le  TartufFe  the  note  of  high  Comedy 
strikes  when  Orgon  on  his  return  home  hears 
of  his  idoFs  excellent  appetite.  '  Le  pauvre 
homme!''  he  exclaims.  He  is  told  that  the 
wife  of  his  bosom  has  been  unwell.  '  Et  Tar- 
tuffe  f  "*  he  asks,  impatient  to  hear  him  spoken 
of,  his  mind  suffused  with  the  thought  of 
Tartuffe,  crazy  with  tenderness,  and  again  he 
croons,  '  Le  pauvre  homme ! '  It  is  the  mother's 
cry  of  pitying  delight  at  a  nurse''s  recital  of  the 
feats  in  young  animal  gluttony  of  her  cherished 
infant.  After  this  masterstroke  of  the  Comic, 
you  not  only  put  faith  in  Orgon's  roseate  pre- 
possession, you  share  it  with  him  by  comic 
sympathy,  and  can  listen  with  no  more  than 
a  tremble  of  the  laughing  muscles  to  the 
instance  he  gives  of  the  sublime  humanity  of 
Tartuffe  : 

'  Un  rien  presque  sujSit  pour  le  scandaliser, 
Jusque-la,  qu'il  se  vint  Tautre  jour  accuser 
D'avoir  pris  une  puce  en  faisant  sa  priere_, 
Et  de  I'avoir  tuee  avec  trop  de  colere.' 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  55 

And  to  have  killed  it  too  wrathfully  !  Trans- 
lating Moliere  is  like  humming  an  air  one  has 
heard  performed  by  an  accomplished  violinist 
of  the  pure  tones  without  flourish. 

Orgon,  awakening  to  find  another  dupe  in 
Madame  Pernelle,  incredulous  of  the  revela- 
tions which  have  at  last  opened  his  own 
besotted  eyes,  is  a  scene  of  the  double  Comic, 
vivified  by  the  spell  previously  cast  on  the 
mind.  There  we  feel  the  power  of  the  poet's 
creation ;  and  in  the  sharp  light  of  that 
sudden  turn  the  humanity  is  livelier  than  any 
realistic  work  can  make  it. 

Italian  Comedy  gives  many  hints  for  a  Tar- 
tuffe  ;  but  they  may  be  found  in  Boccaccio, 
as  well  as  in  Machiavelli's  Mandragola.  The 
Frate  Timoteo  of  this  piece  is  only  a  very  oily 
friar,  compliantly  assisting  an  intrigue  with 
ecclesiastical  sophisms  (to  use  the  mildest  word) 
for  payment.  Frate  Timoteo  has  a  fine 
Italian  priestly  pose. 

Donna:  Credete  vol,  che^  Turco  passi 
questo  anno  in  Italia  ? 


56^  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

•  F.  Tim.  :  Se  voi  nonjhte  orazio7ie,  si. 

Priestly  arrogance  and  unctuousness,  and 
trickeries  and  casuistries,  cannot  be  painted 
without  our  discovering  a  likeness  in  the 
long  Italian  gallery.  Goldoni  sketched  the 
Venetian  manners  of  the  decadence  of  the 
Republic  with  a  French  pencil,  and  was  an 
Italian  Scribe  in  style. 

The  Spanish  stage  is  richer  in  such  Comedies 
as  that  which  furnished  the  idea  of  the 
Menteur  to  Corneille.  But  you  must  force 
yourself  to  believe  that  this  liar  is  not  forcing 
his  vein  when  he  piles  lie  upon  lie.  There  is 
no  preceding  touch  to  win  the  mind  to  credu- 
lity. Spanish  Comedy  is  generally  in  sharp 
outline,  as  of  skeletons ;  in  quick  movement,  as 
of  marionnettes.  The  Comedy  might  be  per- 
formed by  a  troop  of  the  corps  de  ballet ;  and 
in  the  recollection  of  the  reading  it  resolves 
to  an  animated  shuffle  of  feet.  It  is,  in  fact, 
something  other  than  the  true  idea  of  Comedy. 
Where  the  sexes  are  separated,  men  and 
women  grow,  as  the  Portugese  call  it,  affaima- 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  57 

dos  of  one  another,  famine-stricken  ;  and  all 
the  tragic  elements  are  on  the  stage.  Don 
Juan  is  a  comic  character  that  sends  souls 
flying :  nor  does  the  humour  of  the  breaking 
of  a  dozen  women'*s  hearts  conciliate  the  Comic 
Muse  with  the  drawing  of  blood. 

German  attempts  at  Comedy  remind  one 
vividly  of  Heine^s  image  of  his  country  in  the 
dancing  of  Atta  Troll.  Lessing  tried  his 
hand  at  it,  with  a  sobering  effect  upon  readers. 
The  intention  to  produce  the  reverse  effect  is 
just  visible,  and  therein,  like  the  portly  graces 
of  the  poor  old  Pyrenean  Bear  poising  and 
twirling  on  his  right  hind-leg  and  his  left, 
consists  the  fun.  Jean  Paul  Richter  gives  the 
best  edition  of  the  German  Comic  in  the  con- 
trast of  Siebenkas  with  his  Lenette.  A  light  of 
the  Comic  is  in  Goethe ;  enough  to  complete 
the  splendid  figure  of  the  man,  but  no  more. 

The  German  literary  laugh,  like  the  timed 
awakenings  of  their  Barbarossa  in  the  hollows 
of  the  Untersberg,  is  infrequent,  and  rather 
monstrous — never  a  laugh  of  men  and  women 


58  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

in  concert.  It  comes  of  unrefined  abstract 
fancy,  grotesque  or  grim,  or  gross,  like  the 
peculiar  humours  of  their  little  earthmen. 
Spiritual  laughter  they  have  not  yet  attained 
to  :  sentimentalism  waylays  them  in  the  flight. 
Here  and  there  a  Volkslied  or  Marchen  shows 
a  national  aptitude  for  stout  animal  laughter ; 
and  we  see  that  the  literature  is  built  on  it, 
which  is  hopeful  so  far ;  but  to  enjoy  it,  to 
enter  into  the  philosophy  of  the  Broad  Grin, 
that  seems  to  hesitate  between  the  skull  and  the 
embryo,  and  reaches  its  perfection  in  breadth 
from  the  pulling  of  two  square  fingers  at  the 
corners  of  the  mouth,  one  must  have  aid  of 
'  the  good  Rhine  wine,'  and  be  of  German 
blood  unmixed  besides.  This  treble-Dutch 
lumbersomeness  of  the  Comic  spirit  is  of  it- 
self exclusive  of  the  idea  of  Comedy,  and  the 
poor  voice  allowed  to  women  in  German 
domestic  life  will  account  for  the  absence  of 
comic  dialogues  reflecting  upon  life  in  that 
land.  I  shall  speak  of  it  again  in  the  second 
section  of  this  lecture. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  59 

Eastward  you  have  total  silence  of  Comedy 
among  a  people  intensely  susceptible  to 
laughter,  as  the  Arabian  Nights  will  testify. 
Where  the  veil  is  over  women's  faces,  you  can- 
not have  society,  without  which  the  senses 
are  barbarous  and  the  Comic  spirit  is  driven 
to  the  gutters  of  grossness  to  slake  its  thirst. 
Arabs  in  this  respect  are  worse  than  Italians 
— much  worse  than  Germans ;  just  in  the 
degree  that  their  system  of  treating  women 
is  worse. 

M.  Saint-Marc  Girardin,  the  excellent 
French  essayist  and  master  of  critical  style, 
tells  of  a  conversation  he  had  once  with  an 
Arab  gentleman  on  the  topic  of  the  different 
management  of  these  difficult  creatures  in 
Orient  and  in  Occident :  and  the  Arab  spoke 
in  praise  of  many  good  results  of  the  greater 
freedom  enjoyed  by  Western  ladies,  and  the 
charm  of  conversing  with  them.  He  was 
questioned  why  his  countrymen  took  no 
measures  to  grant  them  something  of  that 
kind  of  liberty.     He  jumped  out  of  his   in- 


60  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

dividuality  in  a  twinkling,  and  entered  into 
the  sentiments  of  his  race,  replying,  from  the 
pinnacle  of  a  splendid  conceit,  with  affected 
humility  of  manner  :  '  You  can  look  on  them 
without  perturbation — but  we  I''  .  .  .  And 
after  this  profoundly  comic  interjection,  he 
added,  in  deep  tones,  'The  very  face  of  a 
woman  ! '  Our  representative  of  temperate 
notions  demurely  consented  that  the  Arab's 
pride  of  inflammability  should  insist  on  the 
prudery  of  the  veil  as  the  civilizing  medium 
of  his  race. 

There  has  been  fun  in  Bagdad.  But  there 
never  will  be  civilization  where  Comedy  is  not 
possible;  and  that  comes  of  some  degree  of 
social  equality  of  the  sexes.  I  am  not  quoting 
the  Arab  to  exhort  and  disturb  the  somnolent 
East ;  rather  for  cultivated  women  to  recognize 
that  the  Comic  Muse  is  one  of  their  best 
friends.  They  are  blind  to  their  interests  in 
swelling  the  ranks  of  the  sentimentalists.  Let 
them  look  with  their  clearest  vision  abroad 
and  at  home.     They  will  see  that  where  they 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  6l 

have  no  social  freedom,  Comedy  is  absent : 
where  they  are  household  drudges,  the  form 
of  Comedy  is  primitive  :  where  they  are  toler- 
ably independent,  but  uncultivated,  exciting 
melodrama  takes  its  place  and  a  sentimental 
version  of  them.  Yet  the  Comic  will  out,  as 
they  would  know  if  they  listened  to  some  of 
the  private  conversations  of  men  whose  minds 
are  undirected  by  the  Comic  Muse  :  as  the 
sentimental  man,  to  his  astonishment,  would 
know  likewise,  if  he  in  similar  fashion  could 
receive  a  lesson.  But  where  women  are  on  the 
road  to  an  equal  footing  with  men,  in  attain- 
ments and  in  liberty — in  what  they  have  won 
for  themselves,  and  what  has  been  granted  them 
by  a  fair  civilization — there,  and  only  waiting 
to  be  transplanted  from  life  to  the  stage, 
or  the  novel,  or  the  poem,  pure  Comedy 
flourishes,  and  is,  as  it  would  help  them  to 
be,  the  sweetest  of  diversions,  the  wisest  of 
delightful  companions. 

Now,  to  look  about  us  in  the  present  time, 
I  think  it  will  be  acknowledged  that  in  neglect- 


62  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

ing  the  cultivation  of  the  Comic  idea,  we  are 
losing  the  aid  of  a  powerful  auxiliar.  You 
see  Folly  perpetually  sliding  into  new  shapes 
in  a  society  possessed  of  wealth  and  leisure, 
with  many  whims,  many  strange  ailments  and 
strange  doctors.  Plenty  of  common-sense  is 
in  the  world  to  thrust  her  back  when  she  pre- 
tends to  empire.  But  the  first-born  of  common- 
sense,  the  vigilant  Comic,  which  is  the  genius 
of  thoughtful  laughter,  which  would  readily 
extinguish  her  at  the  outset,  is  not  serving  as 
a  public  advocate. 

You  will  have  noticed  the  disposition  of 
common- sense,  under  pressure  of  some  pertina- 
cious piece  of  light-headedness,  to  grow  impa- 
tient and  angry.  That  is  a  sign  of  the  absence, 
or  at  least  of  the  dormancy,  of  the  Comic  idea. 
For  Folly  is  the  natural  prey  of  the  Comic, 
known  to  it  in  all  her  transformations,  in  every 
disguise ;  and  it  is  with  the  springing  delight 
of  hawk  over  heron,  hound  after  fox,  that  it 
gives  her  chase,  never  fretting,  never  tiring, 
sure  of  having  her,  allowing  her  no  rest. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  63 

Contempt  is  a  sentiment  that  cannot  be 
entertained  by  comic  intelligence.  What  is  it 
but  an  excuse  to  be  idly  minded,  or  personally 
lofty,  or  comfortably  narrow,  not  perfectly 
humane  ?  If  we  do  not  feign  when  we  say 
that  we  despise  Folly,  we  shut  the  brain. 
There  is  a  disdainful  attitude  in  the  presence 
of  Folly,  partaking  of  the  foolishness  to  Comic 
perception  :  and  anger  is  not  much  less  foolish 
than  disdain.  The  struggle  we  have  to  con- 
duct is  essence  against  essence.  Let  no  one 
doubt  of  the  sequel  when  this  emanation  of 
what  is  firmest  in  us  is  launched  to  strike  down 
the  daughter  of  Unreason  and  Sentimentalism  : 
such  being  Folly's  parentage,  when  it  is  re- 
spectable. 

Our  modern  system  of  combating  her  is  too 
long  defensive,  and  carried  on  too  ploddingly 
with  concrete  engines  of  war  in  the  attack. 
She  has  time  to  get  behind  entrenchments. 
She  is  ready  to  stand  a  siege,  before  the 
heavily  armed  man  of  science  and  the  writer 
of  the  leading  article  or  elaborate  essay  have 


64  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

primed  their  big  guns.  It  should  be  remem- 
bered that  she  has  charms  for  the  multitude ; 
and  an  English  multitude  seeing  her  make  a 
gallant  fight  of  it  will  be  half  in  love  with  her, 
certainly  willing  to  lend  her  a  cheer.  Benevo- 
lent subscriptions  assist  her  to  hire  her  own 
man  of  science,  her  own  organ  in  the  Press. 
If  ultimately  she  is  cast  out  and  overthrown, 
she  can  stretch  a  finger  at  gaps  in  our  ranks. 
She  can  say  that  she  commanded  an  army  and 
seduced  men,  whom  we  thought  sober  men  and 
safe,  to  act  as  her  lieutenants.  We  learn 
rather  gloomily,  after  she  has  flashed  her 
lantern,  that  we  have  in  our  midst  able  men 
and  men  with  minds  for  whom  there  is  no 
pole-star  in  intellectual  navigation.  Comedy, 
or  the  Comic  element,  is  the  specific  for  the 
poison  of  delusion  while  Folly  is  passing 
from  the  state  of  vapour  to  substantial  form. 

O  for  a  breath  of  Aristophanes,  Rabelais, 
Voltaire,  Cervantes,  Fielding,  Moliere  !  These 
are  spirits  that,  if  you  know  them  well,  will 
come  when  you  do  call.     You  will  find  the 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  65 

very  invocation  of  them  act  on  you  like  a 
renovating  air — the  South-west  coming  oiF  the 
sea,  or  a  cry  in  the  Alps. 

No  one  would  presume  to  say  that  we  are 
deficient  in  jokers.  They  abound,  and  the 
organisation  directing  their  machinery  to  shoot 
them  in  the  wake  of  the  leading  article  and 
the  popular  sentiment  is  good. 

But  the  Comic  differs  from  them  in  address- 
ing the  wits  for  laughter;  and  the  sluggish 
wits  want  some  training  to  respond  to  it, 
whether  in  public  life  or  private,  and  particu- 
larly when  the  feelings  are  excited. 

The  sense  of  the  Comic  is  much  blunted  by 
habits  of  punning  and  of  using  humouristic 
phrase :  the  trick  of  employing  Johnsonian 
polysyllables  to  treat  of  the  infinitely  little. 
And  it  really  may  be  humorous,  of  a  kind, 
yet  it  will  miss  the  point  by  going  too  much 
round  about  it. 

A  certain  French  Duke  Pasquier  died,  some 
years  back,  at  a  very  advanced  age.  He  had 
been  the  venerable  Duke  Pasquier  in  his  later 

E 


66  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

years  up  to  the  period  of  his  death.  There 
was  a  report  of  Duke  Pasquier  that  he  was  a 
man  of  profound  egoism.  Hence  an  argument 
arose,  and  was  warmly  sustained,  upon  the 
excessive  selfishness  of  those  who,  in  a  world 
of  troubles,  and  calls  to  action,  and  innumer- 
able duties,  husband  their  strength  for  the 
sake  of  living  on.  Can  it  be  possible,  the 
argument  ran,  for  a  truly  generous  heart  to 
continue  beating  up  to  the  age  of  a  hundred  ? 
Duke  Pasquier  was  not  without  his  defenders, 
who  likened  him  to  the  oak  of  the  forest — a 
venerable  comparison. 

The  argument  was  conducted  on  both  sides 
with  spirit  and  earnestness,  lightened  here  and 
there  by  frisky  touches  of  the  polysyllabic 
playful,  reminding  one  of  the  serious  pursuit 
of  their  fun  by  truant  boys,  that  are  assured 
they  are  out  of  the  eye  of  their  master,  and 
now  and  then  indulge  in  an  imitation  of  him. 
And  well  might  it  be  supposed  that  the  Comic 
idea  was  asleep,  not  overlooking  them !  It 
resolved  at  last  to  this,  that  either  Duke  Pas- 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  67 

quier  was  a  scandal  on  our  humanity  in  cling- 
ing to  life  so  long,  or  that  he  honoured  it  by 
so  sturdy  a  resistance  to  the  enemy.  As  one 
who  has  entangled  himself  in  a  labyrinth  is 
glad  to  get  out  again  at  the  entrance,  the 
argument  ran  about  to  conclude  with  its  com- 
mencement. 

Now,  imagine  a  master  of  the  Comic  treat- 
ing this  theme,  and  particularly  the  argument 
on  it.  Imagine  an  Aristophanic  comedy  of  The 
Centenarian,  with  choric  praises  of  heroical 
early  death,  and  the  same  of  a  stubborn 
vitality,  and  the  poet  laughing  at  the  chorus ; 
and  the  grand  question  for  contention  in 
dialogue,  as  to  the  exact  age  when  a  man 
should  die,  to  the  identical  minute,  that  he 
may  preserve  the  respect  of  his  fellows,  fol- 
lowed by  a  systematic  attempt  to  make  an 
accurate  measurement  in  parallel  lines,  with  a 
tough  rope-yarn  by  one  party,  and  a  string  of 
yawns  by  the  other,  of  the  veteran's  power  of 
enduring  life,  and  our  capacity  for  enduring 
Mm,  with  tremendous  pulling  on  both  sides. 


68  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

Would  not  the  Comic  view  of  the  discussion 
illumine  it  and  the  disputants  like  very  light- 
ning ?  There  are  questions,  as  well  as  persons, 
that  only  the  Comic  can  fitly  touch. 

Aristophanes  would  probably  have  crowned 
the  ancient  tree,  with  the  consolatory  observa- 
tion to  the  haggard  line  of  long-expectant 
heirs  of  the  Centenarian,  that  they  live  to  see 
the  blessedness  of  coming  of  a  strong  stock. 
The  shafts  of  his  ridicule  would  mainly  have 
been  aimed  at  the  disputants.  For  the  sole 
ground  of  the  argument  was  the  old  man's 
character,  and  sophists  are  not  needed  to 
demonstrate  that  we  can  very  soon  have  too 
much  of  a  bad  thing.  A  Centenarian  does 
not  necessarily  provoke  the  Comic  idea,  nor 
does  the  corpse  of  a  duke.  It  is  not  provoked 
in  the  order  of  nature,  until  we  draw  its  pene- 
trating attentiveness  to  some  circumstance 
with  which  we  have  been  mixing  our  private 
interests,  or  our  speculative  obfuscation.  Dul- 
ness,  insensible  to  the  Comic,  has  the  privilege 
of  arousing  it ;  and  the  laying  of  a  dull  finger 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  69 

on  matters  of  human  life  is  the  surest  method 
of  establishing  electrical  communications  with 
a  battery  of  laughter — where  the  Comic  idea 
is  prevalent. 

But  if  the  Comic  idea  prevailed  with  us, 
and  we  had  an  Aristophanes  to  barb  and  wing 
it,  we  should  be  breathing  air  of  Athens. 
Prosers  now  pouring  forth  on  us  like  public 
fountains  would  be  cut  short  in  the  street  and 
left  blinking,  dumb  as  pillar-posts,  with  letters 
thrust  into  their  mouths.  We  should  throw 
off  incubus,  our  dreadful  familiar — by  some 
called  boredom — whom  it  is  our  present  humi- 
liation to  be  just  alive  enough  to  loathe, 
never  quick  enough  to  foil.  There  would  be 
a  bright  and  positive,  clear  Hellenic  perception 
of  facts.  The  vapours  of  Unreason  and  Senti- 
mentalism  would  be  blown  away  before  they 
were  productive.  Where  would  Pessimist  and 
Optimist  be?  They  would  in  any  case  have 
a  diminished  audience.  Yet  possibly  the 
change  of  despots,  from  good-natured  old 
obtuseness  to  keen-edged   intelligence,  which 


70  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

is  by  nature  merciless,  would  be  more  than  we 
could  bear.  The  rupture  of  the  link  between 
dull  people,  consisting  in  the  fraternal  agree- 
ment that  something  is  too  clever  for  them, 
and  a  shot  beyond  them,  is  not  to  be  thought 
of  lightly;  for,  slender  though  the  link  may 
seem,  it  is  equivalent  to  a  cement  forming  a 
concrete  of  dense  cohesion,  very  desirable  in 
the  estimation  of  the  statesman. 

A  political  Aristophanes,  taking  advantage 
of  his  lyrical  Bacchic  licence,  was  found  too 
much  for  political  Athens.  I  would  not  ask 
to  have  him  revived,  but  that  the  sharp  light 
of  such  a  spirit  as  his  might  be  with  us  to 
strike  now  and  then  on  public  affairs,  public 
themes,  to  make  them  spin  along  more 
briskly. 

He  hated  with  the  politician's  fervour  the 
sophist  who  corrupted  simplicity  of  thought, 
the  poet  who  destroyed  purity  of  style,  the 
demagogue,  'the  saw- toothed  monster,'  who, 
as  he  conceived,  chicaned  the  mob,  and  he 
held   his    own  against  them   by   strength   of 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  71 

laughter,   until   fines,   the   curtailing    of    his 

Comic   licence   in  the  chorus,  and  ultimately 

the  ruin  of  Athens,  which  could   no  longer 

support  the  expense  of  the  chorus,  threw  him 

altogether  on  dialogue,  and  brought  him  under 

the   law.     After   the   catastrophe,   the    poet, 

who  had  ever  been  gazing  back  at  the  men  of 

Marathon  and  Salamis,  must  have  felt  that  he 

had  foreseen  it ;  and  that  he  was  wise  when 

he   pleaded  for   peace,  and   derided   military 

coxcombry,   and   the    captious    old    creature 

Demus,  we  can  admit.     He   had   the   Comic 

poet's  gift  of  common-sense — which  does  not 

always  include   political  intelligence ;  yet  his 

political  tendency  raised   him  above  the  Old 

Comedy  turn  for  uproarious  farce.     He  abused 

Socrates,     but     Xenophon,    the    disciple    of 

Socrates,  by   his   trained   rhetoric   saved   the 

Ten  Thousand.     Aristophanes  might  say  that 

if  his  warnings  had  been  followed  there  would 

have  been  no  such  thing  as  a  mercenary  Greek 

expedition    under    Cyrus.     Athens,   however, 

was  on  a  landslip,  falling ;  none  could  arrest 


72  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

it.  To  gaze  back,  to  uphold  the  old  times, 
was  a  most  natural  conservatism,  and  fruitless. 
The  aloe  had  bloomed.  Whether  right  or 
wrong  in  his  politics  and  his  criticisms,  and 
bearing  in  mind  the  instruments  he  played  on 
and  the  audience  he  had  to  win,  there  is  an 
idea  in  his  comedies :  it  is  the  Idea  of  Good 
Citizenship. 

He  is  not  likely  to  be  revived.  He  stands, 
like  Shakespeare,  an  unapproachable.  Swift 
says  of  him,  with  a  loving  chuckle  : 

'  But  as  for  Comic  Aristophanes, 
The  dog  too  witty  and  too  profane  is.' 

Aristophanes  was  'profane,**  under  satiric 
direction,  unlike  his  rivals  Cratinus,  Phryni- 
chus,  Ameipsias,  Eupolis,  and  others,  if  we 
are  to  believe  him,  who  in  their  extraordinary 
Donnybrook  Fair  of  the  day  of  Comedy, 
thumped  one  another  and  everybody  else  with 
absolute  heartiness,  as  he  did,  but  aimed  at 
small  game,  and  dragged  forth  particular 
women,  which  he  did  not.     He  is  an  aggregate 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  73 

of  many  men,  all  of  a  certain  greatness.  We 
may  build  up  a  conception  of  his  powers  if  we 
mount  Rabelais  upon  Hudibras,  lift  him  with 
the  songfulriess  of  Shelley,  give  him  a  vein  of 
Heinrich  Heine,  and  cover  him  with  the 
mantle  of  the  Anti-Jacobin,  adding  (that 
there  may  be  some  Irish  in  him)  a  dash  of 
Grattan,  before  he  is  in  motion. 

But  such  efforts  at  conceiving  one  great  one 
by  incorporation  of  minors  are  vain,  and  cry 
for  excuse.  Supposing  Wilkes  for  leading 
man  in  a  country  constantly  plunging  into 
war  under  some  plumed  Lamachus,  with 
enemies  periodically  firing  the  land  up  to  the 
gates  of  London,  and  a  Samuel  Foote,  of 
prodigious  genius,  attacking  him  with  ridicule, 
I  think  it  gives  a  notion  of  the  conflict  en- 
gaged in  by  Aristophanes.  This  laughing 
bald-pate,  as  he  calls  himself,  was  a  Titanic 
pamphleteer,  using  laughter  for  his  political 
weapon ;  a  laughter  without  scruple,  the 
laughter  of  Hercules.  He  was  primed  with 
wit,  as  with  the  garlic  he  speaks  of  giving  to 


74  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

the  game-cocks,  to  make  them  fight  the  better. 
And  he  was  a  lyric  poet  of  aerial  delicacy, 
with  the  homely  song  of  a  jolly  national  poet, 
and  a  poet  of  such  feeling  that  the  comic 
mask  is  at  times  no  broader  than  a  cloth  on  a 
face  to  show  the  serious  features  of  our  com- 
mon likeness.  He  is  not  to  be  revived ;  but 
if  his  method  were  studied,  some  of  the  fire 
in  him  would  come  to  us,  and  we  might  be 
revived. 

Taking  them  generally,  the  English  public 
are  most  in  sympathy  with  this  primitive 
Aristophanic  comedy,  wherein  the  comic  is 
capped  by  the  grotesque,  irony  tips  the  wit, 
and  satire  is  a  naked  sword.  They  have  the 
basis  of  the  Comic  in  them :  an  esteem  for 
common-sense.  They  cordially  dislike  the 
reverse  of  it.  They  have  a  rich  laugh,  though 
it  is  not  the  gros  rire  of  the  Gaul  tossing  gros 
sel,  nor  the  polished  Frenchman's  mentally 
digestive  laugh.  And  if  they  have  now,  like 
a  monarch  with  a  troop  of  dwarfs,  too  many 
jesters   kicking   the   dictionary  about,  to   let 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  75 

them  reflect  that  they  are  dull,  occasionally, 
like  the  pensive  monarch  surprising  himself 
with  an  idea  of  an  idea  of  his  own,  they  look 
so.  And  they  are  given  to  looking  in  the 
glass.  They  must  see  that  something  ails 
them.  How  much  even  the  better  order  of 
them  will  endure,  without  a  thought  of  the 
defensive,  when  the  person  afflicting  them  is 
protected  from  satire,  we  read  in  Memoirs  of 
a  Preceding  Age,  where  the  vulgarly  tyran- 
nous hostess  of  a  great  house  of  reception 
shuffled  the  guests  and  played  them  like  a 
pack  of  cards,  with  her  exact  estimate  of  the 
strength  of  each  one  printed  on  them:  and 
still  this  house  continued  to  be  the  most 
popular  in  England ;  nor  did  the  lady  ever 
appear  in  print  or  on  the  boards  as  the  comic 
type  that  she  was. 

It  has  been  suggested  that  they  have  not 
yet  spiritually  comprehended  the  signification 
of  living  in  society ;  for  who  are  cheerfuller, 
brisker  of  wit,  in  the  fields,  and  as  explorers, 
colonizers,  backwoodsmen?     They  are   happy 


76  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

in  rough  exercise,  and  also  in  complete  repose. 
The  intermediate  condition,  when  they  are 
called  upon  to  talk  to  one  another,  upon  other 
than  affairs  of  business  or  their  hobbies,  re- 
veals them  wearing  a  curious  look  of  vacancy, 
as  it  were  the  socket  of  an  eye  wanting.  The 
Comic  is  perpetually  springing  up  in  social 
life,  and  it  oppresses  them  from  not  being 
perceived. 

Thus,  at  a  dinner-party,  one  of  the  guests, 
who  happens  to  have  enrolled  himself  in  a 
Burial  Company,  politely  entreats  the  others 
to  inscribe  their  names  as  shareholders,  ex- 
patiating on  the  advantages  accruing  to  them 
in  the  event  of  their  very  possible  speedy 
death,  the  salubrity  of  the  site,  the  aptitude 
of  the  soil  for  a  quick  consumption  of  their 
remains,  etc. ;  and  they  drink  sadness  from  the 
incongruous  man,  and  conceive  indigestion,  not 
seeing  him  in  a  sharply  defined  light,  that 
would  bid  them  taste  the  comic  of  him.  Or 
it  is  mentioned  that  a  newly  elected  member 
of  our   Parliament   celebrates   his   arrival  at 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  77 

eminence  by  the  publication  of  a  book  on  cab- 
fares,  dedicated  to  a  beloved  female  relative 
deceased,  and  the  comment  on  it  is  the  word 
'  Indeed.'  But,  merely  for  a  contrast,  turn  to 
a  not  uncommon  scene  of  yesterday  in  the 
hunting-field,  where  a  brilliant  young  rider, 
having  broken  his  collar-bone,  trots  away  very 
soon  after,  against  medical  interdict,  half  put 
together  in  splinters,  to  the  most  distant  meet 
of  his  neighbourhood,  sure  of  escaping  his 
doctor,  who  is  the  first  person  he  encounters. 
'  I  came  here  purposely  to  avoid  you,**  says  the 
patient.  '  I  came  here  purposely  to  take  care 
of  you,'  says  the  doctor.  Off  they  go,  and 
come  to  a  swollen  brook.  The  patient  clears 
it  handsomely :  the  doctor  tumbles  in.  All 
the  field  are  alive  with  the  heartiest  relish  of 
every  incident  and  every  cross-light  on  it ;  and 
dull  would  the  man  have  been  thought  who 
had  not  his  word  to  say  about  it  when  riding 
home. 

In  our  prose  literature  we  have  had  delight- 
ful Comic  writers.     Besides  Fielding  and  Gold- 


78  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

smith,  there  is  Miss  Austen,  whose  Emma  and 
Mr.  Elton  might  walk  straight  into  a  comedy, 
were  the  plot  arranged  for  them.  Galfs 
neglected  novels  have  some  characters  and 
strokes  of  shrewd  comedy.  In  our  poetic 
literature  the  comic  is  delicate  and  graceful 
above  the  touch  of  Italian  and  French.  Gener- 
ally, however,  the  English  elect  excel  in  satire, 
and  they  are  noble  humourists.  The  national 
disposition  is  for  hard-hitting,  with  a  moral 
purpose  to  sanction  it;  or  for  a  rosy,  some- 
times a  larmoyant,  geniality,  not  unmanly  in 
its  verging  upon  tenderness,  and  with  a  singu- 
lar attraction  for  thick-headedness,  to  decorate 
it  with  asses^  ears  and  the  most  beautiful 
sylvan  haloes.  But  the  Comic  is  a  different 
spirit. 

You  may  estimate  your  capacity  for  Comic 
perception  by  being  able  to  detect  the  ridicule 
of  them  you  love,  without  loving  them  less : 
and  more  by  being  able  to  see  yourself  some- 
what ridiculous  in  dear  eyes,  and  accepting 
the  correction  their  image  of  you  proposes. 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  79 

Each  one  of  an  affectionate  couple  may  be 
willing,  as  we  say,  to  die  for  the  other,  yet 
unwilling  to  utter  the  agreeable  word  at  the 
right  moment ;  but  if  the  wits  were  sufficiently 
quick  for  them  to  perceive  that  they  are  in  a 
comic  situation,  as  affectionate  couples  must 
be  when  they  quarrel,  they  would  not  wait  for 
the  moon  or  the  almanac,  or  a  Dorine,  to 
bring  back  the  flood-tide  of  tender  feelings, 
that  they  should  join  hands  and  lips. 

If  you  detect  the  ridicule,  and  your  kindli- 
ness is  chilled  by  it,  you  are  slipping  into  the 
grasp  of  Satire. 

If  instead  of  falling  foul  of  the  ridiculous 
person  with  a  satiric  rod,  to  make  him  writhe 
and  shriek  aloud,  you  prefer  to  sting  him 
under  a  semi-caress,  by  which  he  shall  in  his 
anguish  be  rendered  dubious  whether  indeed 
anything  has  hurt  him,  you  are  an  engine  of 
Irony. 

If  you  laugh  all  round  him,  tumble  him, 
roll  him  about,  deal  him  a  smack,  and  drop  a 
tear  on  him,  own  his  likeness  to  you  and  yours 


80  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

to  your  neighbour,  spare  him  as  little  as 
you  shun,  pity  him  as  much  as  you  expose, 
it  is  a  spirit  of  Humour  that  is  moving 
you. 

The  Comic,  which  is  the  perceptive,  is  the 
governing  spirit,  awakening  and  giving  aim  to 
these  powers  of  laughter,  but  it  is  not  to  be 
confounded  with  them :  it  enfolds  a  thinner 
form  of  them,  differing  from  satire,  in  not 
sharply  driving  into  the  quivering  sensibilities, 
and  from  humour,  in  not  comforting  them  and 
tucking  them  up,  or  indicating  a  broader 
than  the  range  of  this  bustling  world  to 
them. 

Fielding's  Jonathan  Wild  presents  a  case 
of  this  peculiar  distinction,  when  that  man  of 
eminent  greatness  remarks  upon  the  unfairness 
of  a  trial  in  which  the  condemnation  has  been 
brought  about  by  twelve  men  of  the  opposite 
party  ;  for  it  is  not  satiric,  it  is  not  humorous ; 
yet  it  is  immensely  comic  to  hear  a  guilty 
villain  protesting  that  his  own  '  party '  should 
have  a  voice  in  the  Law.     It  opens  an  avenue 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  81 

into  villains'*  ratiocination.^  And  the  Comic 
is  not  cancelled  though  we  should  suppose 
Jonathan  to  be  giving  play  to  his  humour. 
I  may  have  dreamed  this  or  had  it  suggested 
to  me,  for  on  referring  to  Jonathan  Wild,  I 
do  not  find  it. 

Apply  the  case  to  the  man  of  deep  wit,  who 
is  ever  certain  of  his  condemnation  by  the 
opposite  party,  and  then  it  ceases  to  be  comic, 
and  will  be  satiric. 

The  look  of  Fielding  upon  Richardson  is 
essentially  comic.  His  method  of  correcting 
the  sentimental  writer  is  a  mixture  of  the 
comic  and  the  humorous.  Parson  Adams  is 
a  creation  of  humour.  But  both  the  concep- 
tion and  the  presentation  of  Alceste  and  of 
TartuiFe,  of  Celimene  and  Philaminte,  are 
purely  comic,  addressed  to  the  intellect :  there 
is  no  humour  in  them,  and  they  refresh  the 

1  The  exclamation  of  Lady  Booby,  when  Joseph 
defends  himself :  '  Your  virtue  !  I  shall  never  survive 
it !'  etc.,  is  another  instance. — Joseph  Andrevrs.  Also 
that  of  Miss  Mathews  in  her  narrative  to  Booth  :  '  But 
such  are  the  friendships  of  women.' — Amelia, 
F 


82  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

intellect  they  quicken  to  detect  their  comedy, 
by  force  of  the  contrast  they  offer  between 
themselves  and  the  wiser  world  about  them ; 
that  is  to  say,  society,  or  that  assemblage 
of  minds  whereof  the  Comic  spirit  has  its 
origin. 

Byron  had  splendid  powers  of  humour,  and 
the  most  poetic  satire  that  we  have  example 
of,  fusing  at  times  to  hard  irony.  He  had  no 
strong  comic  sense,  or  he  would  not  have  taken 
an  anti-social  position,  which  is  directly  op- 
posed to  the  Comic ;  and  in  his  philosophy, 
judged  by  philosophers,  he  is  a  comic  figure, 
by  reason  of  this  deficiency.  '  So  bald  er 
philosophirt  ist  er  ein  Kind,'  Goethe  says  of 
him.  Carlyle  sees  him  in  this  comic  light, 
treats  him  in  the  humorous  manner. 

The  Satirist  is  a  moral  agent,  often  a 
social  scavenger,  working  on  a  storage  of 
bile. 

The  Ironeist  is  one  thing  or  another, 
according  to  his  caprice.  Irony  is  the  humour 
of  satire ;  it  may  be  savage  as  in  Swift,  with  a 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  83 

moral  object,  or  sedate,  as  in  Gibbon,  with  a 
malicious.  The  foppish  irony  fretting  to  be 
seen,  and  the  irony  which  leers,  that  you  shall 
not  mistake  its  intention,  are  failures  in 
satiric  effort  pretending  to  the  treasures  of 
ambiguity. 

The  Humourist  of  mean  order  is  a  refreshing 
laugher,  giving  tone  to  the  feelings  and  some- 
times allowing  the  feelings  to  be  too  much  for 
him.  But  the  humourist  of  high  has  an 
embrace  of  contrasts  beyond  the  scope  of  the 
Comic  poet. 

Heart  and  mind  laugh  out  at  Don  Quixote, 
and  still  you  brood  on  him.  The  juxtaposition 
of  the  knight  and  squire  is  a  Comic  conception, 
the  opposition  of  their  natures  most  humor- 
ous. They  are  as  different  as  the  two  hemi- 
spheres in  the  time  of  Columbus,  yet  they 
touch  and  are  bound  in  one  by  laughter.  The 
knighfs  great  aims  and  constant  mishaps,  his 
chivalrous  valiancy  exercized  on  absurd  objects, 
his  good  sense  along  the  highroad  of  the  craziest 
of  expeditions ;  the  compassion  he  plucks  out 


84  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

of  derision,  and  the  admirable  figure  he  pre- 
serves while  stalking  through  the  frantically 
grotesque  and  burlesque  assailing  him,  are  in 
the  loftiest  moods  of  humour,  fusing  the 
Tragic  sentiment  with  the  Comic  narrative. 

The  stroke  of  the  great  humourist  is  world- 
wide, with  lights  of  Tragedy  in  his  laughter. 

Taking  a  living  great,  though  not  creative, 
humourist  to  guide  our  description  :  the  skull 
of  Yorick  is  in  his  hands  in  our  seasons  of 
festival ;  he  sees  visions  of  primitive  man 
capering  preposterously  under  the  gorgeous 
robes  of  ceremonial.  Our  souls  must  be  on 
fire  when  we  wear  solemnity,  if  we  would  not 
press  upon  his  shrewdest  nerve.  Finite  and 
infinite  flash  from  one  to  the  other  with  him, 
lending  him  a  two-edged  thought  that  peeps 
out  of  his  peacefuUest  lines  by  fits,  like  the 
lantern  of  the  fire-watcher  at  windows,  going 
the  rounds  at  night.  The  comportment  and 
performances  of  men  in  society  are  to  him,  by 
the  vivid  comparison  with  their  mortality, 
more  grotesque  than   respectable.      But   ask 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  85 

yourself,  Is  he  always  to  be  relied  on  for  just- 
ness? He  will  fly  straight  as  the  emissary 
eagle  back  to  Jove  at  the  true  Hero.  He  will 
also  make  as  determined  a  swift  descent  upon 
the  man  of  his  wilful  choice,  whom  we  cannot 
distinguish  as  a  true  one.  This  vast  power  of 
his,  built  up  of  the  feelings  and  the  intellect 
in  union,  is  often  wanting  in  proportion  and 
in  discretion.  Humourists  touching  upon 
History  or  Society  are  given  to  be  capricious. 
They  are,  as  in  the  case  of  Sterne,  given  to  be 
sentimental;  for  with  them  the  feelings  are 
primary,  as  with  singers.  Comedy,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  an  interpretation  of  the  general 
mind,  and  is  for  that  reason  of  necessity  kept 
in  restraint.  The  French  lay  marked  stress  on 
mesure  et  gout,  and  they  own  how  much  they 
owe  to  Moliere  for  leading  them  in  simple 
justness  and  taste.  We  can  teach  them  many 
things ;  they  can  teach  us  in  this. 

The  Comic  poet  is  in  the  narrow  field,  or 
enclosed  square,  of  the  society  he  depicts  ;  and 
he  addresses  the  still  narrower  enclosure    of 


86  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

men's  intellects,  with  reference  to  the  operation 
of  the  social  world  upon  their  characters.  He 
is  not  concerned  with  beginnings  or  endings 
or  surroundings,  but  with  what  you  are  now 
weaving.  To  understand  his  work  and  value 
it,  you  must  have  a  sober  liking  of  your  kind 
and  a  sober  estimate  of  our  civilized  qualities. 
The  aim  and  business  of  the  Comic  poet  are 
misunderstood,  his  meaning  is  not  seized  nor 
his  point  of  view  taken,  when  he  is  accused  of 
dishonouring  our  nature  and  being  hostile  to 
sentiment,  tending  to  spitefulness  and  making 
an  unfair  use  of  laughter.  Those  who  detect 
irony  in  Comedy  do  so  because  they  choose  to 
see  it  in  life.  Poverty,  says  the  satirist,  has 
nothing  harder  in  itself  than  that  it  makes 
men  ridiculous.  But  poverty  is  never  ridi- 
culous to  Comic  perception  until  it  attempts 
to  make  its  rags  conceal  its  bareness  in  a  for- 
lorn attempt  at  decency,  or  foolishly  to  rival 
ostentation.  Caleb  Balderstone,  in  his  endea- 
vour to  keep  up  the  honour  of  a  noble  house- 
hold in  a  state  of  beggary,  is  an  exquisitely 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  87 

comic  character.  In  the  case  of  '  poor  rela- 
tives,' on  the  other  hand,  it  is  the  rich,  whom 
they  perplex,  that  are  really  comic;  and  to 
laugh  at  the  former,  not  seeing  the  comedy 
of  the  latter,  is  to  betray  dulness  of  vision. 
Humourist  and  Satirist  frequently  hunt  to- 
gether as  Ironeists  in  pursuit  of  the  grotesque, 
to  the  exclusion  of  the  Comic.  That  was  an 
affecting  moment  in  the  history  of  the  Prince 
Regent,  when  the  First  Gentleman  of  Europe 
burst  into  tears  at  a  sarcastic  remark  of  Beau 
Brummell's  on  the  cut  of  his  coat.  Humour, 
Satire,  Irony,  pounce  on  it  altogether  as  their 
common  prey.  The  Comic  spirit  eyes  but  does 
not  touch  it.  Put  into  action,  it  would  be 
farcical.     It  is  too  gross  for  Comedy. 

Incidents  of  a  kind  casting  ridicule  on  our 
unfortunate  nature  instead  of  our  conventional 
life,  provoke  derisive  laughter,  which  thwarts 
the  Comic  idea.  But  derision  is  foiled  by 
the  play  of  the  intellect.  Most  of  doubtful 
causes  in  contest  are  open  to  Comic  inter- 
pretation,  and   any   intellectual   pleading   of 


88  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

a  doubtful  cause  contains  germs  of  an  Idea 
of  Comedy. 

The  laughter  of  satire  is  a  blow  in  the 
back  or  the  face.  The  laughter  of  Comedy  is 
impersonal  and  of  unrivalled  politeness,  nearer 
a  smile ;  often  no  more  than  a  smile.  It  laughs 
through  the  mind,  for  the  mind  directs  it ;  and 
it  might  be  called  the  humour  of  the  mind. 

One  excellent  test  of  the  civilization  of  a 
country,  as  I  have  said,  I  take  to  be  the 
flourishing  of  the  Comic  idea  and  Comedy; 
and  the  test  of  true  Comedy  is  that  it  shall 
awaken  thoughtful  laughter. 

If  you  believe  that  our  civilization  is  founded 
in  common-sense  (and  it  is  the  first  condition 
of  sanity  to  believe  it),  you  will,  when  contem- 
plating men,  discern  a  Spirit  overhead;  not 
more  heavenly  than  the  light  flashed  upward 
from  glassy  surfaces,  but  luminous  and  watch- 
ful ;  never  shooting  beyond  them,  nor  lagging  in 
the  rear ;  so  closely  attached  to  them  that  it 
may  be  taken  for  a  slavish  reflex,  until  its 
features  are  studied.     It  has  the  sage's  brows, 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  89 

and  the  sunny  malice  of  a  faun  lurks  at  the 
corners  of  the  half-closed  lips  drawn  in  an  idle 
wariness  of  half  tension.  That  slim  feasting 
smile,  shaped  like  the  long-bow,  was  once  a 
big  round  satyr's  laugh,  that  flung  up  the 
brows  like  a  fortress  lifted  by  gunpowder. 
The  laugh  will  come  again,  but  it  will  be  of 
the  order  of  the  smile,  finely  tempered,  show- 
ing sunlight  of  the  mind,  mental  richness 
rather  than  noisy  enormity.  Its  common 
aspect  is  one  of  unsolicitous  observation,  as  if 
surveying  a  full  field  and  having  leisure  to 
dart  on  its  chosen  morsels,  without  any  flut- 
tering eagerness.  Men's  future  upon  earth 
does  not  attract  it ;  their  honesty  and  shapeli- 
ness in  the  present  does;  and  whenever  they 
wax  out  of  proportion,  overblown,  affected, 
pretentious,  bombastical,  hypocritical,  pedan- 
tic, fantastically  delicate;  whenever  it  sees 
them  self-deceived  or  hoodwinked,  given  to 
run  riot  in  idolatries,  drifting  into  vanities, 
congregating  in  absurdities,  planning  short- 
sightedly, plotting  dementedly ;  whenever  they 


90  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

are  at  variance  with  their  professions,  and 
violate  the  unwritten  but  perceptible  laws 
binding  them  in  consideration  one  to  another ; 
whenever  they  offend  sound  reason,  fair  justice; 
are  false  in  humility  or  mined  with  conceit, 
individually,  or  in  the  bulk — the  Spirit  over- 
head will  look  humanely  malign  and  cast  an 
oblique  light  on  them,  followed  by  volleys  of 
silvery  laughter.     That  is  the  Comic  Spirit. 

Not  to  distinguish  it  is  to  be  bull-blind  to 
the  spiritual,  and  to  deny  the  existence  of  a 
mind  of  man  where  minds  of  men  are  in  work- 
ing conjunction. 

You  must,  as  I  have  said,  believe  that  our 
state  of  society  is  founded  in  common-sense, 
otherwise  you  will  not  be  struck  by  the  con- 
trasts the  Comic  Spirit  perceives,  or  have  it  to 
look  to  for  your  consolation.  You  will,  in  fact, 
be  standing  in  that  peculiar  oblique  beam  of 
light,  yourself  illuminated  to  the  general  eye 
as  the  very  object  of  chase  and  doomed  quarry 
of  the  thing  obscure  to  you.  But  to  feel  its 
presence  and  to  see  it  is  your  assurance  that 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  91 

many  sane  and  solid  minds  are  with  you  in 
what  you  are  experiencing  :  and  this  of  itself 
spares  you  the  pain  of  satirical  heat,  and  the 
bitter  craving  to  strike  heavy  blows.  You 
share  the  sublime  of  wrath,  that  would  not 
have  hurt  the  foolish,  but  merely  demonstrate 
their  foolishness.  Moliere  was  contented  to 
revenge  himself  on  the  critics  of  the  Ecole  des 
Femmes,  by  writing  the  Critique  de  FEcole  des 
Femmes,  one  of  the  wisest  as  well  as  the  play- 
fullest  of  studies  in  criticism.  A  perception  of 
the  comic  spirit  gives  high  fellowship.  You 
become  a  citizen  of  the  selecter  world,  the 
highest  we  know  of  in  connection  with  our 
old  world,  which  is  not  supermundane.  Look 
there  for  your  unchallengeable  upper  class ! 
You  feel  that  you  are  one  of  this  our  civilized 
community,  that  you  cannot  escape  from  it, 
and  would  not  if  you  could.  Good  hope  sus- 
tains you ;  weariness  does  not  overwhelm  you ; 
in  isolation  you  see  no  charms  for  vanity; 
personal  pride  is  greatly  moderated.  Nor 
shall  your  title  of  citizenship  exclude  you  from 


92  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

worlds  of  imagination  or  of  devotion.  The 
Comic  spirit  is  not  hostile  to  the  sweetest 
songfully  poetic.  Chaucer  bubbles  with  it: 
Shakespeare  overflows :  there  is  a  mild  moon's 
ray  of  it  (pale  with  super-refinement  through 
distance  from  our  flesh  and  blood  planet)  in 
Comus.  Pope  has  it,  and  it  is  the  daylight 
side  of  the  night  half  obscuring  Cowper.  It 
is  only  hostile  to  the  priestly  element,  when 
that,  by  baleful  swelling,  transcends  and  over- 
laps the  bounds  of  its  office :  and  then,  in 
extreme  cases,  it  is  too  true  to  itself  to  speak, 
and  veils  the  lamp :  as,  for  example,  the 
spectacle  of  Bossuet  over  the  dead  body  of 
Moliere :  at  which  the  dark  angels  may,  but 
men  do  not  laugh. 

We  have  had  comic  pulpits,  for  a  sign  that 
the  laughter-moving  and  the  worshipful  may 
be  in  alliance :  I  know  not  how  far  comic,  or 
how  much  assisted  in  seeming  so  by  the  un- 
expectedness and  the  relief  of  its  appearance  :  at 
least  they  are  popular,  they  are  said  to  win  the 
ear.    Laughter  is  open  to  perversion,  like  other 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  93 

good  things ;  the  scornful  and  the  brutal  sorts 
are  not  unknown  to  us;  but  the  laughter 
directed  by  the  Comic  spirit  is  a  harmless 
wine,  conducing  to  sobriety  in  the  degree  that 
it  enlivens.  It  enters  you  like  fresh  air  into  a 
study ;  as  when  one  of  the  sudden  contrasts 
of  the  comic  idea  floods  the  brain  like  reassur- 
ing daylight.  You  are  cognizant  of  the  true 
kind  by  feeling  that  you  take  it  in,  savour  it, 
and  have  what  flowers  live  on,  natural  air  for 
food.  That  which  you  give  out — the  joyful 
roar — is  not  the  better  part;  let  that  go  to 
good  fellowship  and  the  benefit  of  the  lungs. 
Aristophanes  promises  his  auditors  that  if  they 
will  retain  the  ideas  of  the  comic  poet  care- 
fully, as  they  keep  dried  fruits  in  boxes,  their 
garments  shall  smell  odoriferous  of  wisdom 
throughout  the  year.  The  boast  will  not  be 
thought  an  empty  one  by  those  who  have 
choice  friends  that  have  stocked  themselves 
according  to  his  directions.  Such  treasuries 
of  sparkling  laughter  are  wells  in  our  desert. 
Sensitiveness  to  the  comic  laugh  is  a  step  in 


94  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

civilization.  To  shrink  from  being  an  object 
of  it  is  a  step  in  cultivation.  We  know  the 
degree  of  refinement  in  men  by  the  matter 
they  will  laugh  at,  and  the  ring  of  the  laugh  ; 
but  we  know  likewise  that  the  larger  natures 
are  distinguished  by  the  great  breadth  of  their 
power  of  laughter,  and  no  one  really  loving 
Moliere  is  refined  by  that  love  to  despise  or 
be  dense  to  Aristophanes,  though  it  may  be 
that  the  lover  of  Aristophanes  will  not  have 
risen  to  the  height  of  Moliere.  Embrace  them 
both,  and  you  have  the  whole  scale  of  laughter 
in  your  breast.  Nothing  in  the  world  sur- 
passes in  stormy  fun  the  scene  in  The  Frogs, 
when  Bacchus  and  Xanthias  receive  their 
thrashings  from  the  hands  of  businesslike 
(Eacus,  to  discover  which  is  the  divinity  of 
the  two,  by  his  imperviousness  to  the  mortal 
condition  of  pain,  and  each,  under  the  obliga- 
tion of  not  crying  out,  makes  believe  that  his 
horrible  bellow — the  god's  iou  iou  being  the 
lustier — means  only  the  stopping  of  a  sneeze, 
or  horseman  sighted,  or  the   prelude  to  an 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  9^ 

invocation  to  some  deity :  and  the  slave  con- 
trives that  the  god  shall  get  the  bigger  lot  of 
blows.  Passages  of  Rabelais,  one  or  two  in 
Don  Quixote,  and  the  Supper  in  the  Manner 
of  the  Ancients,  in  Peregrine  Pickle,  are  of  a 
similar  cataract  of  laughter.  But  it  is  not  illu- 
minating ;  it  is  not  the  laughter  of  the  mind. 
Moliere"'s  laughter,  in  his  purest  comedies,  is 
ethereal,  as  light  to  our  nature,  as  colour  to 
our  thoughts.  The  Misanthrope  and  the  Tar- 
tufFe  have  no  audible  laughter ;  but  the  char- 
acters are  steeped  in  the  comic  spirit.  They 
quicken  the  mind  through  laughter,  from  com- 
ing out  of  the  mind;  and  the  mind  accepts 
them  because  they  are  clear  interpretations  of 
certain  chapters  of  the  Book  lying  open  before 
us  all.  Between  these  two  stand  Shakespeare 
and  Cervantes,  with  the  richer  laugh  of  heart 
and  mind  in  one;  with  much  of  the  Aristo- 
phanic  robustness,  something  of  Moliere's 
delicacy. 

The  laughter  heard  in  circles  not  pervaded 


96  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

by  the  Comic  idea,  will  sound  harsh  and  soul- 
less, like  versified  prose,  if  you  step  into  them 
with  a  sense  of  the  distinction.  You  will 
fancy  you  have  changed  your  habitation  to  a 
planet  remoter  from  the  sun.  You  may  be 
among  powerful  brains  too.  You  will  not  find 
poets — or  but  a  stray  one,  over- worshipped. 
You  will  find  learned  men  undoubtedly,  pro- 
fessors, reputed  philosophers,  and  illustrious 
dilettanti.  They  have  in  them,  perhaps,  every 
element  composing  light,  except  the  Comic. 
They  read  verse,  they  discourse  of  art;  but 
their  eminent  faculties  are  not  under  that 
vigilant  sense  of  a  collective  supervision, 
spiritual  and  present,  which  we  have  taken 
note  of.  They  build  a  temple  of  arrogance ; 
they  speak  much  in  the  voice  of  oracles ;  their 
hilarity,  if  it  does  not  dip  in  grossness,  is 
usually  a  form  of  pugnacity. 

Insufficiency  of  sight  in  the  eye  looking 
outward  has  deprived  them  of  the  eye  that 
should  look  inward.  They  have  never  weighed 
themselves  in  the  delicate  balance  of  the  Comic 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  97 

idea  so  as  to  obtain  a  suspicion  of  the  rights 
and  dues  of  the  world  ;  and  they  have,  in 
consequence,  an  irritable  personality.  A  very 
learned  English  professor  crushed  an  argument 
in  a  political  discussion,  by  asking  his  adver- 
sary angrily  :  '  Are  you  aware,  sir,  that  I  am 
a  philologer  ?  "* 

The  practice  of  polite  society  will  help  in 
training  them,  and  the  professor  on  a  sofa 
with  beautiful  ladies  on  each  side  of  him,  may 
become  their  pupil  and  a  scholar  in  manners 
without  knowing  it :  he  is  at  least  a  fair  and 
pleasing  spectacle  to  the  Comic  Muse.  But 
the  society  named  polite  is  volatile  in  its  adora- 
tions, and  to-morrow  will  be  petting  a  bronzed 
soldier,  or  a  black  African,  or  a  prince,  or  a 
spiritualist :  ideas  cannot  take  root  in  its  ever- 
shifting  soil.  It  is  besides  addicted  in  self- 
defence  to  gabble  exclusively  of  the  affairs  oi 
its  rapidly  revolving  world,  as  children  on  a 
whirligoround  bestow  their  attention  on  the 
wooden  horse  or  cradle  ahead  of  them,  to 
escape  from  giddiness  and  preserve  a  notion 

6 


98  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

of  identity.  The  professor  is  better  out  of 
a  circle  that  often  confounds  by  lionizing, 
sometimes  annoys  by  abandoning,  and  always 
confuses.  The  school  that  teaches  gently 
what  peril  there  is  lest  a  cultivated  head  should 
still  be  coxcomb's,  and  the  collisions  which  may 
befall  high-soaring  minds,  empty  or  full,  is 
more  to  be  recommended,  than  the  sphere  of 
incessant  motion  supplying  it  with  material. 

Lands  where  the  Comic  spirit  is  obscure 
overhead  are  rank  with  raw  crops  of  matter. 
The  traveller  accustomed  to  smooth  highways 
and  people  not  covered  with  burrs  and  prickles 
is  amazed,  amid  so  much  that  is  fair  and 
cherishable,  to  come  upon  such  curious  bar- 
barism. An  Englishman  paid  a  visit  of 
admiration  to  a  professor  in  the  Land  of  Cul- 
ture, and  was  introduced  by  him  to  another 
distinguished  professor,  to  whom  he  took  so 
cordially  as  to  walk  out  with  him  alone  one 
afternoon.  The  first  professor,  an  erudite 
entirely  worthy  of  the  sentiment  of  scholarly 
esteem  prompting   the   visit,  behaved  (if  we 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  9.9 

exclude  the  dagger)  with  the  vindictive  jeal- 
ousy of  an  injured  Spanish  beauty.  After  a 
short  prelude  of  gloom  and  obscure  explosions, 
he  discharged  upon  his  faithless  admirer  the 
bolts  of  passionate  logic  familiar  to  the  ears  of 
flighty  caballeros : — '  Either  I  am  a  fit  object 
of  your  admiration,  or  I  am  not.  Of  these 
things  one  —  either  you  are  competent  to 
judge,  in  which  case  I  stand  condemned  by 
you;  or  you  are  incompetent,  and  therefore 
impertinent,  and  you  may  betake  yourself  to 
your  country  again,  hypocrite  !  "^  The  admirer 
was  for  persuading  the  wounded  scholar  that  it 
is  given  to  us  to  be  able  to  admire  two  profes- 
sors at  a  time.     He  was  driven  forth. 

Perhaps  this  might  have  occurred  in  any 
country,  and  a  comedy  of  The  Pedant,  dis- 
covering the  greedy  humanity  within  the 
dusty  scholar,  would  not  bring  it  home  to  one 
in  particular.  I  am  mindful  that  it  was  in 
Germany,  when  I  observe  that  the  Germans 
have  gone  through  no  comic  training  to  warn 
them  of  the  sly,  wise  emanation  eyeing  them 


100  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

from  aloft,  nor  much  of  satirical.  Heinrich 
Heine  has  not  been  enough  to  cause  them  to 
smart  and  meditate.  Nationally,  as  well  as 
individually,  when  they  are  excited  they  are  in 
danger  of  the  grotesque,  as  when,  for  instance, 
they  decline  to  listen  to  evidence,  and  raise  a 
national  outcry  because  one  of  German  blood 
has  been  convicted  of  crime  in  a  foreign 
country.  They  are  acute  critics,  yet  they  still 
wield  clubs  in  controversy.  Compare  them  in 
this  respect  with  the  people  schooled  in  La 
Bruyere,  La  Fontaine,  Moliere ;  with  the 
people  who  have  the  figures  of  a  Trissotin  and 
a  Vadius  before  them  for  a  comic  warning  of 
the  personal  vanities  of  the  caressed  professor. 
It  is  more  than  difference  of  race.  It  is  the 
difference  of  traditions,  temper,  and  style, 
which  comes  of  schooling. 

The  French  controversialist  is  a  polished 
swordsman,  to  be  dreaded  in  his  graces  and 
courtesies.  The  German  is  Orson,  or  the  mob, 
or  a  marching  army,  in  defence  of  a  good  case 
or  a  bad — a  big  or  a  little.     His  irony  is  a 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  101 

missile  of  terrific  tonnage :  sarcasm  he  emits 
like  a  blast  from  a  dragon^s  mouth.  He  must 
and  will  be  Titan.  He  stamps  his  foe  under- 
foot, and  is  astonished  that  the  creature  is  not 
dead,  but  stinging ;  for,  in  truth,  the  Titan  is 
contending,  by  comparison,  with  a  god. 

When  the  Germans  lie  on  their  arms, 
looking  across  the  Alsatian  frontier  at  the 
crowds  of  Frenchmen  rushing  to  applaud 
L'ami  Fritz  at  the  Theatre  Franc^ais,  looking 
and  consideiing  the  meaning  of  that  applause, 
which  is  grimly  comic  in  its  political  response 
to  the  domestic  moral  of  the  play — when  the 
Germans  watch  and  are  silent,  their  force  of 
character  tells.  They  are  kings  in  music,  we 
may  say  princes  in  poetry,  good  speculators 
in  philosophy,  and  our  leaders  in  scholarship. 
That  so  gifted  a  race,  possessed  moreover  of 
the  stern  good  sense  which  collects  the  waters 
of  laughter  to  make  the  wells,  should  show  at 
a  disadvantage,  I  hold  for  a  proof,  instructive 
to  us,  that  the  discipline  of  the  comic  spirit  is 
needful  to  their  growth.     We  see  what  they 


102  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

can  reach  to  in  that  great  figure  of  modem  man- 
hood, Goethe.  They  are  a  growing  people; 
they  are  conversable  as  well ;  and  when  their 
men,  as  in  France,  and  at  intervals  at  Berlin 
tea-tables,  consent  to  talk  on  equal  terms  with 
their  women,  and  to  listen  to  them,  their 
growth  will  be  accelerated  and  be  shapelier. 
Comedy,  or  in  any  form  the  Comic  spirit,  will 
then  come  to  them  to  cut  some  figures  out  of 
the  block,  show  them  the  mirror,  enliven  and 
irradiate  the  social  intelligence. 

Modern  French  comedy  is  commendable  for 
the  directness  of  the  study  of  actual  life,  as  far 
as  that,  which  is  but  the  early  step  in  such  a 
scholarship,  can  be  of  service  in  composing 
and  colouring  the  picture.  A  consequence  of 
this  crude,  though  well-meant,  realism  is  the 
collision  of  the  writers  in  their  scenes  and 
incidents,  and  in  their  characters.  The  Muse 
of  most  of  them  is  an  Aventuriere.  She  is 
clever,  and  a  certain  diversion  exists  in  the 
united  scheme  for  confounding  her.  The 
object  of  this  person  is  to  reinstate  herself  in 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  lOS 

the  decorous  world  ;  and  either,  having  accom- 
plished this  purpose  through  deceit,  she  has  a 
nostalgie  de  la  boue,  that  eventually  casts  her 
back  into  it,  or  she  is  exposed  in  her  course  of 
deception  when  she  is  about  to  gain  her  end. 
A  very  good,  innocent  young  man  is  her 
victim,  or  a  very  astute,  goodish  young  man 
obstructs  her  path.  This  latter  is  enabled  to 
be  the  champion  of  the  decorous  world  by 
knowing  the  indecorous  well.  He  has  assisted 
in  the  progress  of  Aventurieres  downward ;  he 
will  not  help  them  to  ascend.  The  world  is 
with  him ;  and  certainly  it  is  not  much  of  an 
ascension  they  aspire  to;  but  what  sort  of 
a  figure  is  he  ?  The  triumph  of  a  candid 
realism  is  to  show  him  no  hero.  You  are  to 
admire  him  (for  it  must  be  supposed  that 
realism  pretends  to  waken  some  admiration)  as 
a  credibly  living  young  man ;  no  better,  only  a 
little  firmer  and  shrewder,  than  the  rest.  If, 
however,  you  think  at  all,  after  the  curtain 
has  fallen,  you  are  likely  to  think  that  the 
Aventurieres  have  a  case  to  plead  against  him. 


104  THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY 

True,  and  the  author  has  not  said  anything 
to  the  contrary  ;  he  has  but  painted  from  the 
life ;  he  leaves  his  audience  to  the  reflections 
of  unphilosophic  minds  upon  life,  from  the 
specimen  he  has  presented  in  the  bright  and 
narrow  circle  of  a  spy-glass. 

I  do  not  know  that  the  fly  in  amber  is  of 
any  particular  use,  but  the  Comic  idea  enclosed 
in  a  comedy  makes  it  more  generally  percep- 
tible and  portable,  and  that  is  an  advantage. 
There  is  a  benefit  to  men  in  taking  the  lessons 
of  Comedy  in  congregations,  for  it  enlivens  the 
wits ;  and  to  writers  it  is  beneficial,  for  they 
must  have  a  clear  scheme,  and  even  if  they 
have  no  idea  to  present,  they  must  prove  that 
they  have  made  the  public  sit  to  them  before 
the  sitting  to  see  the  picture.  And  writing 
for  the  stage  would  be  a  corrective  of  a  too- 
incrusted  scholarly  style,  into  which  some  great 
ones  fall  at  times.  It  keeps  minor  writers  to  a 
definite  plan,  and  to  English.  Many  of  them 
now  swelling  a  plethoric  market,  in  the  com- 
position of  novels,  in  pun-manufactories  and  in 


THE  IDEA  OF  COMEDY  105 

journalism ;  attached  to  the  machinery  forcing 
perishable  matter  on  a  public  that  swallows 
voraciously  and  groans;  might,  with  encour- 
agement, be  attending  to  the  study  of  art  in 
literature.  Our  critics  appear  to  be  fascinated 
by  the  quaintness  of  our  public,  as  the  world 
is  when  our  beast-garden  has  a  new  importa- 
tion of  magnitude,  and  the  creature''s  appetite 
is  reverently  consulted.  They  stipulate  for  a 
writer''s  popularity  before  they  will  do  much 
more  than  take  the  position  of  umpires  to 
record  his  failure  or  success.  Now  the  pig 
supplies  the  most  popular  of  dishes,  but  it  is 
not  accounted  the  most  honoured  of  animals, 
unless  it  be  by  the  cottager.  Our  public 
might  surely  be  led  to  try  other,  perhaps 
finer,  meat.  It  has  good  taste  in  song.  It 
might  be  taught  as  justly,  on  the  whole,  and 
the  sooner  when  the  cottager''s  view  of  the 
feast  shall  cease  to  be  the  humble  one  of  our 
literary  critics,  to  extend  this  capacity  for 
delicate  choosing  in  the  direction  of  the 
matter  arousing  laughter. 


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Extracts  from  a  Leading  Article  which  appeared  in  The  Daily 
Chronicle y  November  20th,  1896  : — 

'  Two  companion  volumes  have  been  issued  this  week  which  may 
serve  as  what  Matthew  Arnold  was  fond  of  calling  a  point  de 
rhpere,  a  guiding-mark,  in  English  literature.  '  The  Works  of 
George  Meredith,'  Vols,  i  and  2  (Westminster:  Archibald  Con- 
stable &  Co.),  mean  more,  vastly  more,  than  a  handsome  addition 
to  the  library  shelves.  .  .  .  To-day,  by  the  general  consent  of  the 
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December  ist,  1896  : — 

'  Once  more  we  are  impressed  with  the  essential  sincerity  of  Mr. 
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'  The  size  is  convenient,  the  cover  simple  and  good,  the  paper  of 
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'  These  admirably  told  tales  give  a  better  conception  of  the  life  of  the  wanderer  in 
South  Africa  than  any  formal  book  of  travels.    We  can  hardly  speak  too  cordially  of 
the  little  volume.'— Spectator. 

Pen:  A   Novel 

By  JULIAN  STURGIS 

Cro7vn  8vo.     35.  6d.  [Shortly. 

Hans  Van  Bonder:  A  Romance  of  Boer  Life 

By  CHARLES  MONTAGUE,  Author  of  '  The  Vigil.' 
Fcp.  &V0.     '2S.  6d. 
'  Will  help  some  people  who  are  unacquainted  with  the  Boers  to  form  a  tolerably 
correct  estimate  of  our  friend  Oom  Va\\\.'— Publisher's  Ciratlar. 

'  A  welcome  change  ...  is  to  be  found  in  so  realistic  a  toraaxicc.'— Manchester 
Guardian. 

'  Admirably  told,  and  the  descriptions  of  big  game  shooting  are  highly  exciting.'— 
Scotsman. 

Torriba 

By  JOHN  CAMERON  GRANT 

Fcp.  Svo.     2S.  6d. 
'  "  Torriba"  is  unquestionably  bold  in  treatment  and  well  wntlen.'— Globe. 

Madge  o'  the  Pool 

By  WILLIAM  SHARP 

Fcap.  Zvo.     2S.  6d. 


A  Book  for  Dante  Students 

The  Chronicle  of  Villani 

Edited  by  the  Rev.  P.  H.  WICKSTEED 

Crown  8vo 

'  The  book,  picturesque  and  instructive  reading  as  It  is,  is  not  less  in- 
teresting and  still  more  valuable  for  readers  of  Italy's  greatest  poet.' — 
Scotsman. 

'  Sure  to  have  a  warm  welcome.' — Globe. 

'  A  thoughtful  introduction  gives  a  general  outline  of  the  Florentine  pro- 
blems of  the  period.' — IVestem  Morning  JS'eivs. 

English  Schools.      1546- 1548 

By  A.  F.  LEACH,  M.A.,  F.S.A. 

Late  Fellow  of  All  Souls,  Oxford,  Assistant  Charity  Commissioner 

Demy  8vo 

This  work  shows,  by  records  hitherto  unpublished  and  for  the  most  part 
unknown,  that  there  was  a  widespread  and  effective  provision  in  England 
for  Secondary  Education  before  the  Reformation,  which  was  destroyed  or 
marred  in  efficiency  under  Henry  viii.  and  Edward  vi.,  especially  by  the 
Act  for  the  Confiscation  of  Colleges  and  Charities.  Edward  vi.,  indeed, 
instead  of  being,  as  commonly  reputed,  the  founder,  ought  rather  to  be 
regarded  as  the  destroyer  of  schools.  Some  light  is  also  thrown  on  how  far 
he  is  to  be  regarded  as  restorer  of  what  was  destroyed. 

The  Preaching  of  Islam 

By  T.  W.  ARNOLD.  B.A. 
With   Two  Maps.      Demy  Bvo 

'  One  of  the  most  elaborate  and  careful  accounts  of  the  spread  of  Moham- 
medanism that  we  remember  to  have  seen  in  any  language  As  Professor 
Arnold  rightly  says,  his  subject  is  a  vast  one.  The  writer  has  condensed 
into  less  than  400  pages  a  mass  of  material  that  might  have  alarmed  a 
German  Professor,  let  alone  an  English  one.' — The  Times. 

'  A  scholarly  and  extremely  interesting  volume.  ...  A  highly  valuable 
contribution  to  our  knowledge  of  Mohammedanism.' — Glasgo^v  Herald. 

'  There  has  been  no  English  book  on  Mohammedanisni  printed  since  the 
well-known  Dictionary  that  is  so  informing  and  suggestive  as  this  of  Mr. 
Arnold's,  This  book  is  wanted.  It  is  highly  instructive,  being  clear,  well 
arranged  and  readable.' — Manchester  Guardian. 

'This  is  probably  the  most  sympathetic  history  of  Islam  that  has  ever 
been  written  from  without.  The  book  is  of  very  great  importance.' — 
Expository  Times. 

'Great  historical  interest  attaches  to  Mr.  Arnold's  dealing  with  the 
subject  of  the  relation  of  Christians  to  their  Mussulman  conquerors.'— 2^^r 
IV^eekly  Register. 


THE  'PLEASURE  SERIES'  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 

An  English  Garner 

Ingatherings  from  our  History  and  Literature 

By  EDWARD  ARBER,  F.S.A. 

Fellow  of  King's  College,  London  ;  late  English  Examiner  at  the  London 

University,  and  also  at   the  Victoria  University,  Manchester  ; 

Emeritus  Professor  of  English  Language  and  Literature, 

Mason  College,  Birmingham. 

In  8  vols.,  extra  crown  8vo,  in  a  new  and  attractive  binding, 

£2.  the  set  net.     Any  single  volume,  656  pp. ,  may  be 

obtained  separately,  5s.  net. 

'We  gladly  welcome  a  new  edition  of  Mr.  Edward  Arber's  "English 
Garner,"  Vol.  L,  no  longer  semi-privately  printed,  but  issued  with  the 
imprint  of  Messrs.  Archibald  Constable  &  Co.,  who  will,  we  hope,  succeed 
in  bringing  home  to  a  wide  circle  the  great  services  that  Mr.  Arber  has 
been  doing,  for  nearly  thirty  years,  to  the  study  of  our  older  literature. 
Alone  and  unaided,  he  has  been  the  pioneer  of  cheap  and  accurate  reprints, 
and  it  is  to  him  that  many  a  young  student  has  owed  the  opportunity  of 
making  himself  acquainted  with  books  like  the  "Utopia"  and  the  "  Areo- 
pagitica."  His  collection  called  "An  English  Garner "  is  a  miscellaneous 
gathering  of  short  pieces  in  prose  and  verse  entirely  of  the  sixteenth  century, 
including  a  complete  copy  of  Sidney's  "  Astrophel  and  Stella."  All  this  can 
be  had,  well  edited,  well  printed,  and  well  bound  for  the  price  of  5J.' — 
Times. 

'  This  collection,  considering  its  remarkable  cheapness,  should  be  highly 
appreciated  by  students  of  English  history  from  the  days  of  Elizabeth 
downwards.' — Liverpool  Daily  Post. 

'  Professor  Arber's  work  as  a  collector  of  the  scattered  treasures  of  our 
older  literature  is  so  highly  valued  that  every  student  will  wish  to  have  the 
"Garner"  on  his  shelves  in  its  new  dress.  The  general  equipment  of  the 
volume,  no  less  than  its  contents,  make  it  a  marvel  of  cheapness  at  the 
price  of  five  shillings  ' — Glasgow  Herald. 

The  English  Scholars  Library 

16  Parts  are  now  published,  in  cloth  boards,  £2,  is.    Any  Part 
may  be  obtained  separately. 

English  Reprints 

30  Parts  are  published,  in  cloth  boards,  £2,  is.  6d. 
Any  Part  may  be  obtained  separately. 

%*  Catalogue  giving  full  particulars  of  Titles  sent  post 
free  on  application. 


Completion  of  the  Issue  in  48    Volumes 
CONSTABLE'S  REPRINT 

OF 

The  Waverley  Novels 

THE   FAVOURITE  EDITION   OF 

SIR     WALTER    SCOTT 

With  all   the  Original    Plates  and  Vignettes  (Re-engraved). 
In  48  Volumes 

Foolscap  Svo.     Cloth,  paper  label  title,  \s.  6d.  net  per  Volume, 

or  £s,  I2s.  the  Set.     Also  cloth  gilt,  gilt  top,  2.s.  net  per 

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gilt,  2s.  6d.  net  per  Volume,  or  £6  the  Set. 

*  A  delightful  reprint.  The  price  is  lower  than  that  of  many 
inferior  editions.' — Athenceum. 

'  The  excellence  of  the  print,  and  the  convenient  size  of  the 
volume,  and  the  association  of  this  edition  with  Sir  Walter 
Scott  himself,  should  combine  with  so  moderate  a  price  to 
secure  for  this  reprint  a  popularity  as  great  as  that  which  the 
original  editions  long  and  fully  enjoyed  with  former  generations 
of  readers.' — The  Times. 

'  This  is  one  of  the  most  charming  editions  of  the  Waverley 
Novels  that  we  know,  as  well  as  one  of  the  cheapest  in  the 
market.' — Glasgow  Herald. 

*  Very  attractive  reprints. '— Z/i^  Speaker. 

*.  .  .  Messrs.  Constable  &  Co.  have  done  good  service  to 
the  reading  world  in  reprinting  them. ' — Daily  Chronicle. 

'The  set  presents  a  magnificent  appearance  on  the  book- 
shelf.'—iff/af/&  a«</  White. 


Now  Ready,  in  Six  Foolscap  Svo  Volufjies 

Bosweirs   Life   of  Johnson 

Edited  by  AUGUSTINE  BIRRELL 

With  Frontispieces  by  ALEX.  ANSTED,  a  Reproduction  of 
Sir  Joshua  Reynolds'  Portrait 

Six  Volumes.     Foolscap  Svo.     Cloth,  paper  label,  or  gilt 

extra,  2S.  net  per  Volume.     Also  half  morocco, 

3J.  net  per  Vohime.     Sold  in  Sets  only. 

'  Far  and  away  the  best  Boswell,  I  should  say,  for  the  ordinary 
book-lover,  now  on  the  market.' — II htstrated  London  News. 

' .  .  .  We  have  good  reason  to  be  thankful  for  an  edition  of 
a  very  useful  and  attractive  \i.m<}.^—Spectato7: 

'  The  volumes,  which  are  light  and  so  well  bound  that  they 
open  easily  anywhere,  are  exceedingly  pleasant  to  handle  and 
read. ' — St.  Jameses  Budget. 

'  This  undertaking  of  the  publishers  ought  to  be  certain  of 
success. ' —  The  Bookseller. 

'  Read  him  at  once  if  you  have  hitherto  refrained  from  that 
exhilarating  and  most  varied  entertainment  ;  or,  have  you  read 
him  ? — then  read  him  again.' — The  Speaker. 

'  Constable's  edition  will  long  remain  the  best  both  for  the 
general  reader  and  the  scholar.' — Review  of  Revieivs. 


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